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-</ 



VICTORIAN PEOSE MASTERS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Feench Traits. An Essay in Compara- 
tive Criticism $1.50 

French Art. Classic and Contemporary 
Painting and Sculpture $1.25 

The Same. New and Enlarged Edition with 
Forty- eight Illustrations .... $3.75«ef 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 



THACKERAY — CARLYLE — GEORGE ELIOT — MATTHEW 
ARNOLD — RUSKIN — GEORGE MEREDITH 



BY 

W. C. BROWNELL 



NEW YORK 

CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1901 



THE LIBRARY OFJ 
I CONGRESS, ' 
[Two CoHEa Received] 

OCT. 30 1901 

COPVPIOHT ENTRY 

jCLASS^XXa No. 
COPY B. 






^^ 



Copyright, 1901, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 

Published October, 1901 



•;- ••?'•;:•; **• *,«;,•**. •• 




THE DEVINNE PRESS. 






TO EDWARD L. BURLINGAME 



CONTENTS 

THACKERAY page 

I Vogue 3 

II Art 5 

III Personality 15 

IV World ^ 24 

V Philosophy 37 

VI Style ^^ 

CARLYLE 

I Vogue , .... 49 

II Personality 52 

III Agitated Thinking 58 

IV Reactionary Philosophy 64 

V History 72 

VI Art 77 

VII Style 82 

VIII Moral Cogency 88 

GEORGE ELIOT 

I Vogue 99 

II Psychology 101 

III Action 105 

IV Imagination 108 

V Style 120 

VI Personality 125 

VII Development 130 

viii Philosophy 138 

s vii 



CONTENTS 

MATTHEW ARNOLD ^^^^ 

I Influence 149 

II Personality 152 

III Literary Criticism 157 

IV Social and Political Criticism 169 

V Religious Writings 176 

VI Style 185 

vii Poetry 191 

RUSKIN 

I Life and Work 205 

II MEDIiEVALISM 209 

III Didacticism . 213 

IV Art and Nature 217 

V Influence on the Public 221 

VI Influence on Art 224 

VII Style 226 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

I Vogue 233 

II Temperament 238 

III Characters 243 

IV " Perversity 253 

V The Comic Spirit 259 

VI Passion 264 

VII Women 267 

VIII Imagination 278 

IX Intellectual Eminence 282 



vm 



THACKBEAY 



THACKERAY 



The vogue of Thackeray has steadily increased since 
his death. He has taken his niche in the pantheon 
of English prose by unanimous consent, and it is 
well-nigh universally admitted to be a very high 
one. He is already a classic. He is the representa- 
tive English man of letters of his time, and one of the 
few great novelists of the world. Nothing of the kind 
is more striking than the change that has come over 
popular feeling with regard to his works. Instead of 
cynicism, he is now reproached with sentimentality by 
his censors. Time has brought about a better under- 
standing of the man, and at the same time has modi- 
fied the popular craving for the representation of life 
as a fairy-tale, and the popular disposition to resent 
portraiture as calumny. On the other hand, with the 
increase of his vogue, Thackeray has inevitably become 
to an appreciable extent, during the past few years, the 
prey of critical pedantry; and the elect, who once 
plumed themselves on being his apologists, have begun 
to look into his case with closer scrutiny, and in some 
cases with touchingly disillusioning results. Twenty- 

3 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

live years ago Taine's essay was translated, and since 
then his view has been gradually filtering through the 
Anglo-Saxon criticism that of recent years has tended 
so exclusively to interest itself in and insist on art as 
such in all its manifestations. Taking hold of the 
subject somewhat tardily, perhaps, it has felt a cor- 
responding obligation to treat it drastically, and what- 
ever has seemed to obstruct the easy working of ma- 
chinery laboriously constructed, to elude definitions 
painfully arrived at, has had to suffer. Taine pointed 
out that Thackeray had the temper of the satirist 
which is the opposite of that of the artist ; that this 
was fatal to the form of his works, which were con- 
sequently greatly disfigured by moralizing extraneities ; 
and that the artistic perfection of " Henry Esmond " — 
the single and striking exception among his works — 
illustrated with melancholy vividness the loss art had 
suffered by the absorption in satire of such artistic 
talents. This conclusion — based on assumption novel, 
and therefore attractive in itself, French, and therefore 
definite and consistent, and tending to the exaltation 
of art as such — had but to be stated to be adopted by 
those among us who, " in these days of confusion of 
doctrine and lessening of faith," to cite the words of a 
popular magazine, "are turning for something stable 
and indisputable, not to science, but to art." More- 
over, fiction having become a " finer art " since Thack- 
eray's day, owing to the vigorous filing and sand- 
papering no doubt which it has received in the 

4 



THACKERAY 

course of our critics' and craftsmen's culture evolution, 
the artistic vulnerability of Thackeray as an old 
practitioner is logically deduced. " Perhaps Vol- 
taire was not bad-hearted," says Emerson, "yet he 
said of the good Jesus, even, *I pray you let me 
never hear that man's name again.'" And living 
in our day, and in contact with much of our criti- 
cism, such a consummate artist as Voltaire, ab- 
sorbed in satire as Voltaire indisputably was, might 
conceivably be moved to similar blasphemy against 
the name of "art." The instinctive would at all 
events exhibit impatience with the systematic critic 
for deploring as inartistic and rudimentary the fiction 
of the foremost artist of English prose. 



II 

In any case, the gospel of art for art's sake is 
reduced to absurdity when it is applied to the novel. 
The novel is not its own excuse for being. It is 
a picture of life, but a picture that not only por- 
trays but shows the significance of its subject. 
Its form is particularly, uniquely elastic, and it 
possesses epic advantages which it would fruitlessly 
forego in conforming to purely dramatic canons. Its 
art is the handmaid of its purpose — which is to illus- 
trate the true and aggrandize the good, as well as to 
express the beautiful. Like literature taken in the 
mass, it includes, rather than is identical with, so much 

5 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

of " art " — in the sense in which we use the word with 
reference to inarticulate art— as suits this purpose. Its 
sole artistic standard is fitness ; its measure, the adapt- 
edness of means to end. And dealing thus with all of 
life, it is not sufficient for the novelist to " love," like 
Keats, "the principle of beauty in all things." He 
must love equally the principle of the true and the 
principle of the good. To force the note of " art " in 
the novel is to circumscribe its area of interest and 
limit its range of expression. It is a sacrifice to 
formalism that is at once needless and useless. " The 
bust outlasts the throne, the coin Tiberius," but the 
subject of the novel being rather Tiberius and the 
throne than busts and coins, it is not modelling and 
chasing as such and for their own sweet sake that 
endue it with enduring vitality, but qualities more 
significant and more profound. And these qualities 
depend upon the artist's personality and are insep- 
arable from it. They are essentially human in dis- 
tinction from purely intellectual or sensuous qualities. 
They are qualities without which purely intellectual 
or sensuous qualities produce a result that is often 
sterile and always incomplete. Wherein lies the 
superiority of "Don Quixote" to "Le Capitaine Fra- 
casse," that interesting, ingenious, and really imagina- 
tive masterpiece of Gautier, the devotee, the slave, 
indeed, of art, and the author of the phrase about the 
permanence of the bust and coin just now cited in 
Mr. Dobson's words ? In its human quality personally 

6 



THACKERAY 

expressed. Is " Gil Bias " truly or misleadingly to be 
called a more " artistic " performance than " Don Qui- 
xote " because there is so much Cervantes in the latter 
and no Le Sage at all in the former ? Why is there 
such a sense of life in " The Newcomes," compared i/ 
with Turgenieffs "Virgin Soil," that the story of the 
latter seems by comparison to vibrate idly in vacuo ? 
Because Thackeray enwraps and embroiders his story 
with his personal philosophy, charges it with his 
personal feeling, draws out, with inexhaustible per- 
sonal zest, its typical suggestiveness, and deals with 
his material directly instead of dispassionately and 
disinterestedly, after the manner of the Kussian^ 
master. Can the reader do all this for himself? If 
he can, and can do it as well as Thackeray does it for 
him, he may consider it surplusage, as he may con- 
sider surplusage the Cervantes in "Don Quixote"; 
otherwise, in wishing it away he must reflect that 
" art " is an exacting mistress. 

The question is, after all, mainly one of technic. 
When Thackeray is reproached with "bad art" for 
intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the 
recommendation of a different technic. And each 
man's technic is his own, and that of a master may 
be accepted as possessing some inner principle of pro- 
priety which any suggested improvement would com- 
promise. But it may also be said that for the novel 
on a large scale, the novel as Thackeray understood 
and produced it, Thackeray's technic has certain clear 

7 



VICTOEIAN PEOSE MASTERS 

advantages. In order to deal with life powerfully, 
persuasively, and successfully, the direct method is in 
some respects superior to the detached. It is a com- 
monplace in painting that the scale of subject and the 
kind of effect sought legitimately dictate technic ; and 
the contention, once common among academic painters, 
for the same treatment of subordinate spaces and ob- 
jects as that given to the salient ones, to the end that 
you might enjoy the result one way in the mass and 
then another way in the detail, has perhaps ceased to 
be widely held. A miniature demands a unified treat- 
ment, whereas even the intrusive " Doge Praying " of a 
Venetian canvas is not too great a strain on the im- 
aginative appreciation of the beholder. And, similarly, 
the famous " short story," the writing of which has be- 
come " a finer art " since the day of " The Kickleburys 
on the Khine," demands a treatment appropriate to its 
episodic or microcosmic character which the novel does 
not. And among its requisites is, very likely, — be- 
yond all question, when one considers the personal 
force of most practitioners of the art, — the attitude of 
reserve and detachment in the writer. But Thackeray 
wrote novels. He was not one of the " Little Masters." 
He could do Dutch painting with the most adept of the 
cherry-stone carvers, on occasion, but he never lost sight 
of relations and atmosphere, and for these — in which 
the sense of reality resides — a freer technic is salutary. 
?• Now the one reason for insisting on " objectivity " 
in art is that it is often the condition of illusion — the 

8 



THACKERAY 

illusion of reality in virtue of which art is art and not 
itself reality, the mere material of art. If Thackeray's 
" subjectivity " destroyed illusion it would indeed be in- 
artistic. The notable thing about it is that it deepens 
illusion. The reality of his "happy, harmless fable- 
land " is wonderfully enhanced by the atmosphere with 
which his moralizing enfolds it, and at the same time 
the magic quality of this medium itself enforces our 
sense that it is fable-land, and enables us to savor as 
illusion the illusion of its art. Nothing could estabhsh 
the edifice of his imaginative fiction on so sound a 
basis as those confidences with the reader — subtly 
inspired by his governing passion for truth — in which 
he is constantly protesting that it is fiction after all. 
The artistic service of this element of his fiction is 
aptly indicated by such a contrast as that furnished 
by Maupassant — a master of objective technic if there 
ever was one. When Maupassant exchanges the short 
story, in which his touch and his attainment are per- 
fection, for a larger canvas his atmosphere evaporates. 
Mr. James says of " Une Vie " that if its subject had 
been the existence of an EngHsh lady, " the air of veri- 
simihtude would have demanded that she should have 
been placed in a denser medium." He would have her 
surrounded with more figures, with more of the 
"miscellaneous remplissage of life." The suggestion 
is that of the practitioner, and in harmony with 
Mr. James's impersonal practice ; and, aside from the 
point about the nationality of the heroine, which is 

9 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

not very apposite, it is very just. Mr. James would 
have successfully condensed the medium by the " mis- 
cellaneous remplissage of life." But there is also the 
short cut to verisimilitude of a technic with more color, 
more personal feeling — the technic that provides a 
<5' medium of sensible density by attuning the reader to 
) the rhythm of the subject, and establishes between them 
a mutuality of relationship, the technic of Thackeray. 

And it is to be observed that this atmosphere, 
which exists to such serviceable artistic ends in Thack- 
eray's fiction, exists invariably as atmosphere. It ac- 
centuates the impression of verisimilitude, and consti- 
tutes in itself an element of magical artistic charm; 
but it is not used constructively in either character or 
composition. The reticulation of personal comment 
that rests so lightly and decoratively on the fabric of 
his story, all the imaginative connotation, so to say, 
philosophical and sentimental, of his novels, has but an 
auxiliary function and plays no structural part. It is 
not used to fill out the substance and round the out- 
lines of his personages, who exist quite independently 
of it. It serves, on the contrary, to detach them from 
the background, to detach them from their creator him- 
self. It is absolutely true that Thackeray's " subjec- 
tivity " in this way subtly increases the objectivity of 
his creations. They are in this way definitely "ex- 
teriorized." In this way we get the most vivid, the 
most realizing sense of them as independent existences ; 
and in this way we get Thackeray too. 

10 



THACKERAY 

In the well-known preface to his "Pierre et Jean," 
Maupassant maintains that only by carefully preserv- 
ing the objective attitude can a novehst avoid putting 
himself into his characters. Mr. James, analyzing this 
production with all the acuteness of the analyst who is 
also a craftsman, asserts that to avoid putting himself 
into his characters is "the difficulty of the novelist" 
in general, whether he pursues the impersonal manner 
or not, and maintains that the impersonal manner has 
notably failed to remove this difficulty for Maupassant 
himself. And he insists, as from his works one would 
expect him to insist, that the difficulty "only increases 
the beauty of the problem." Now, speaking as one 
must entirely for one's self, I confess that I for one 
have never felt in reading any of his books that this 
"difficulty of the novelist" existed for Thackeray at 
all. It was not an obstacle he had to circumvent 
Whether we agree with Maupassant that in general it 
can best be circumvented by the impersonal attitude, 
or with Mr. James that there is no reliance to be 
placed upon any mere attitude, we may at least note 
that in the work of novelists of indisputably the first 
rank this difficulty does not have to be circumvented, 
since for them it does not exist. It exists for novelists 
impressed by " the beauty of the problem." Criticism 
is certainly legitimately occupied with discovering the 
laws of artistic production, and to these laws certainly 
the production of the greatest artists, as well as that of 
the least, is legitimately subject. But if these laws 

11 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

are only approximately to be arrived at by formulat- 
ing the practice of the masters, since the ideal in any 
art is only indicated and never perfectly illustrated in 
practice, they are surely not to be rigidly induced from 
the expedients of others in surmounting the difficulties 
of their "problems." And whether the novel be, as 
Mr. James and M. Bourget agree in calling it, the ex- 
pression of " a personal view of life," or, as Taine and 
Maupassant maintain, a colorless view, the question as 
to the art of any particular novel will always be. How 
successful is it in giving us the illusion of the life it 
purports to portray ? 

Thackeray's characters were so little reflections of 
himself, they were so real to him, that, as he says in 
" De Finibus," " I know the sound of their voices." And 
it is to his sense of their reality that his constant talk 
of them is in no small degree to be ascribed. It is to 
the same sense on the reader's part that is to be at- 
tributed no small part of the reader's enjoyment in this 
talk. All this commentary and discursiveness, this 
arguing from Philip or Amelia to men and women in 
general, this moralizing over their traits and conduct, 
has the zest for us that similar criticism and gossip 
about real people, if any such were attainable, would 
possess. If it displeases any reader whose sense for 
" art " is keener than his interest in life, there is per- 
haps no more to be said — except that a sense of humor 
is a good thing, too, and not inapposite in any consider- 
ation of one of the greatest of humorists. But any one 

12 



THACKERAY 

but a pedant more interested in the rules than in the 
result of novel- writing can see that this familiar com- ' 
mentary not only attests but greatly enhances the sense 
of reality, of life, in the characters that furnish its text. 
Even technically considered, it is in this respect the 
acme of art. In Thackeray's hands it does not distract 
the attention, but concentrates it upon the representa- 
tive, the typical, the vital traits of his personages. 
Taine himself having occasion to censure what he 
deems Thackeray's cruel irony in his treatment of 
Kebecca, and oppose to it Balzac's attitude toward 
Valerie Marnefife, explains the superiority of the latter 
by the assertion that " Balzac loves his VaMrie." To 
his assertion that the great artists always exhibit his 
lauded impartial detachment, a critic far less the slave 
of his abstract inductions, Matthew Arnold, replies that 
the burden of all the great works of literature, from 
the "Agamemnon" down, is a desire that the good may 
prevail. I am not sure how far his love for Madame 
Marneffe may count in Balzac's favor, but certainly his 
general attitude of purely scientific though inexhausti- 
ble curiosity is responsible for much of the incurable 
artificiality that impairs his art. His figures are always 
definite, but real as they are, they are not always alive. 
It is the touch of personal feeling that communicates 
the Promethean spark. 

The peril of possessing a gift like this is the dis- 
position to exercise it in excess. When personal ex- 
pression is so easy, so admirable, and so successful as 

13 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS' 

Thackeray's, when, as with him, it is a faculty clearly 
to be exercised instead of repressed, the temptation to 
rely upon it, to overwork it, to give it a free rein, is 
very great. Even in the unique " Eoundabout Papers," 
which are its expression par excellence, there are in- 
stances of this excess. " Philip " is a notable instance. 
Thackerayans read " Philip " — or even " Lovel the Wid- 
ower" — without finding a dull page in it, just as 
Wordsworthians read " Vaudracour and Julia," and the 
whole series of the " Ecclesiastical Sonnets," partly, no 
doubt, out of mere momentum. But every one cannot 
be a Thackerayan, and for others the interest of 
" Philip " now and then flags, probably. It is, indeed, a 
tour de force in prolixity. The proportion of Thackeray 
to Philip is prodigious. The story is decidedly thin ; 
there is next to no plot, and the incidents are few and 
of the same family. The first hundred pages are as- 
tonishing variations on the single theme of Philip's an- 
tagonism to his father. A great deal of the book is 
pure "copy." Even the color is borrowed here and 
there from its predecessors, as where the Little Sister 
" admires " PhiKp for knocking down the Eeverend 
Tufton Hunt, though not of course in the same way 
that Eebecca does her husband, " standing there, strong, 
brave, victorious," after similar treatment of Lord 
Steyne, and where Dr. Eirmin's picture of " Abraham 
Offering up Isaac " performs the service of the Jacob- 
and-Esau tile in the fireplace at Castlewood. How 
many letters are there from Dr. Firmin in America ; 

14 



THACKERAY 

how many glimpses of the Pendennis interior with 
Laura and the children engaged in " osculation " ; how 
many times does Philip get into the same quarrel with 
different people! The characters save the story from ^ 
mediocrity — and triumphantly. They are drawn with 
the true Thackerayan firmness and distinction. Where, 
indeed, is there a weak line in any portrait of his popu- 
lous gallery ? But they have not quite the relief of 
their fellows, and the book would have been far less 
important than it is, distinctly a minor production, but 
for the preachment that occupies so disproportionate a 
space, and, moreover, is of inferior quality to that of 
the great novels, of "Vanity Fair" and "The New- 
comes." And yet excessive as it is and fringing per- 
functoriness as it does, it shows itself in this crucial 
instance of " Philip " — where it is not only abused, 
but treated too lightly — essentially not a defect but a 
quality of Thackeray's equipment. 



Ill 

Thackeray's practice is not perhaps to be recom- 
mended, and critics who have the art of fiction at heart 
cannot do better than to insist on the value of the 
detached attitude in the author. But any view of 
Thackeray is an imperfect one which does not perceive 
that he is a notable exception to the rule wisely enough 
prescribing this attitude in general. His personal force 
and charm take him quite outside of its operation. 

15 



VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

The perfection with which the artist and the satirist are 
united — or rather fused — in him almost entitles his 
novels to classification as a different genre. At least, 
in order to consider them profitably it is necessary to 
take into account in far greater degree than in other 
instances the man himself as well as his works. A 
correct synthesis is reached most directly in his case 
by regarding his works mainly as manifestations of the 
genius that unifies them. Even critics who think it 
bad art for an author to obtrude his personality must 
admit that the evil is lessened in proportion to the in- 
terest of the personality so obtruded. As to the interest 
of Thackeray's, there is likely to be no contention. It 
is one of the most marked in letters. When one con- 
siders his personal force, the notion of confining its 
direct expression to pure dissertation appears grotesque. 
To the true Thackerayan, of course — like Dr. John 
Brown, Mr. Herman Merivale, or Mr. William B. Eeed 

— no price is too great to pay for any of its manifesta- 
tions. It has as much charm as power, and is infinitely 
gracious and winning. It provides an atmosphere of its 
own in which his characters live and move, and to 
which they owe no small portion of their attractiveness 

— in virtue of which, indeed, they constitute an organic 
community by themselves. If he is their " showman," 
he certainly shows them off to advantage, and he him- 
self is not the least interesting figure of the show. 
The spectacle gains immensely from his association 
with the company. How he thinks and feels in the 

16 



THACKERAY 

presence of the drama they are enacting immensely ex- 
tends the range of our interest. Conceive " The New- 
comes" without the presence of Thackeray upon the 
stage — minus the view it gives us of the working of 
its author's mind, the glimpses of his philosophy, the 
touches of his feeling. The result would be like that 
of eliminating the commentary which Colonel Henry 
Esmond interweaves with his autobiography. "Well, 
but Esmond is one of the characters of the book, and 
his prosings are therefore pertinent, says Taine. So is 
Arthur Pendennis, Esq., the putative author of "The 
Newcomes." But Pendennis is the thinnest of whim- 
sical disguises for the real author, and the half-hearted 
attempt to continue him and Laura, as characters is 
purely playful. True, they are needless sops to the 
critical Cerberus, and, aside from adding pleasantly to. 
the machinery of the story, they really serve to show 
how legitimately the reader who is not a pedant may 
enjoy the personality of Thackeray apart from as well 
as with any artistic expedients of the sort. 

In a more definite and apposite way, therefore, than 
is true of a personality that produces works of a more 
impersonal order, Thackeray's own nature becomes the 
most interesting and important subject to consider in 
connection with his works. He was above all else a \ 
lover of truth. The love of truth was with him, in- 
deed, less a sentiment than a passion. It absorbed his 
mind and inspired its activity. To the moral tempera- 
ment thus attested falsehood of all kinds seemed the 

17 



VICTOEIAN PROSE MASTERS 

one thing in the universe worth the evocation of mili- 
tant energy. The exposure of sham enlisted all his 
artistic faculty. He pursued it with the most search- 
ing subtlety ever devoted to a definite artistic aim in 
all his books. The villain of all his stories is the 
hypocrite. Some of them — "Barry Lyndon," "The 
Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan," "The 
Book of Snobs " — are concerned with pretence alone, 
the pretence that eludes the detection of others and 
that which deceives the pretender himself. " The Book 
of Snobs" is an amazing series of variations on this 
single theme — hardly robust enough in itself to have 
avoided flatness and failure, in the course of such elabo- 
ration, by a writer less "possessed" by it. This at 
least is what saves its perennial interest for other 
readers than those familiar with the particular society it 
satirizes, for other than English readers, that is to say. 
" You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs ; to 
do so shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself 
have been taken for one." These statements are for 
all nationalities. 

It need hardly be pointed out that hypocrisy consti- 
tutes one of the most effective elements which the 
novelist can use in portraying human life on a large 
scale and under civilized conditions. Imposture of one 
kind or another almost monopolizes the seamy side of 
any society's existence. In the material of the novel- 
ist of manners it has the same place as crime in that 
of the romance of adventure. It is the natural con- 

18 



THACKERAY 

comitant of gregariousness, the great social bane, the 
social incarnation of Ahriman, the shadow if not also 
the middle tint of the social picture. Almost inevitably 
the novelist, who both by predisposition and by prac- 
tice handles it well, presents a picture of sound and 
vital verisimilitude, and of profounder and more uni- 
versal significance than a study of most other social 
forces affords. 

Thackeray was extremely sensitive, and his suscep- 
tibility was as highly organized as it was sensitive. 
He was quick to take offence when his sense of self- 
respect was touched, and he was nothing less than 
weakly amiable. His quarrel with Dickens over 
Yates's " journalistic " faiix ;pas is witness of both, as 
their reconciliation is of his incapabihty of cherishing 
rancor. In the ocean of ana that since his death has 
eddied about his name are countless instances of his 
goodness of heart, the prodigious fund of kindness in 
his nature, and the tact of its dispensation. All 
women with whom he came in contact expanded in 
the atmosphere of his chivalry — the atmosphere, say, 
of the Brookfield Letters. He was an ideal clubman. 
He had the most deeply attached friends. His fond- \ 
ness for children is proverbial. He used to go to St. 
Paul's on Charity Children's day to hear the thousands 
of young voices singing in unison, with the result and 
to the end of the dimming of his spectacles and the 
enjoyment of "happy pity." He loved to tip school- 
boys, to frequent Bohemia. Artlessness of all kinds 

19 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

had a special attraction for him. What displeased 
him most in the affectation that always revolted him, 
was its element of calculation. He had none of it 
himself. Of all prose writers of the first rank he is 
the most purely instinctive. His high spirits are as- 
tonishing. They are the source of the infectiousness 
of his humor as well as responsible for its occasional 
triviality. And their undercurrent is a melancholy 
that is as native as they. When they flag, the 
lapse is not into dulness — there is more dulness in 
Voltaire ; it is into the allied minor key, which is pur- 
sued with the same sincerity — one is tempted to add, 
with the same zest. Work was mainly drudgery to 
him, in spite of the amount of it which he performed 
and the persistency with which he labored. He was 
thoroughly human in his weaknesses as in his sympa- 
thies, and the sobriety and industry with which he 
subdued his temperamental tendencies and, by control 
and constraint, compelled his faculties to construct the 
literary monument he left, fashioned in the process a 
character that is, in its way, also a monument of ele- 
vated effort. 

Such a nature is too ample to be distinctly critical, 
and Thackeray's had its prejudices, searching as was 
the mind that governed it. His body of doctrine was 
traditional, and he devoted little thought to what 
Carlyle calls "verifying one's ready-reckoner." His 
genius is rather that of the born novelist. He as- 
cribes Napoleon's final defeat to the development of 

20 



THACKEKAY 

military superiority in Wellington. His view of Louis 
XIV. lacks seriousness. His attitude toward things 
French, in general, always good-natured, is yet funda- 
mentally British, — see " The Second Funeral of Napo- 
leon," "The Paris Sketch-Book," — intimately as Paris 
appealed to his epicurean side and sympathetically 
divined and described as his French characters are. 
But in portraying these he is exercising his genius, 
which is never at fault. And it appears as unmistak- 
ably in his essays, his burlesques, his sketches, his 
literary criticism, as in his novels themselves. No 
writer whose fame rests, as Thackeray's larger fame 
does, on notable works of fiction, has written miscella- 
neous literature of such distinction. There is extraor- 
dinarily little " copy " in it. It is the lighter work of 
a man born for greater things, and having therefore in 
its quality something superior to its genre. 

On the other hand, the " illustration," for which he 
seemed to think he had a native bent and which he 
curiously persisted in, is almost unaccountable con- 
sidered in conjunction with any of his other accom- 
plishment, until we remember how little art was 
exacted of "illustrators" by the England of his day. 
Pictorial art was clearly not his vocation. His draw- 
ings have plenty of character ; and it is not unfortu- 
nate, perhaps, that we have his pictorial presentment 
rather than another's, of so many of his personages. 
But he not only lacked the skill that comes of train- 
ing — he had no real gift for representation, and for 

21 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

the plastic expression of beauty he had no faculty; 
the element of caricature is prominent in all his de- 
signs. He did them with great delight and ease, 
whereas Literary work was always drudgery to him; 
but of course this is the converse of witness to their 
merit. 

His poetry, which he wrote at intervals, and desul- 
torily throughout his career, is on a decidedly higher 
plane. It is of the kind that is accurately called 
" verses," but it is as plainly his own as his prose ; and 
some of it will always be read, probably, for its feeling 
and its felicity. It is the verse mainly but not merely 
of the improvisatore. It never oversteps the modesty 
becoming the native gift that expresses itself in it. 
Most of it could not have been as well said in prose ; 
and its title is clear enough, however unpretentious. 
Metrically and in substance the " Ballads " are excellent 
balladry. They never rise to Scott's level of heroic 
'bravura, and though the contemplative ones are deeper 
in feeling than any of Scott's, they are poetically more 
summary and have less sweep; one hardly thinks of 
the pinions of song at all in connection with them. 
Prose was distinctly Thackeray's medium more exclu- 
sively than it was Scott's. But compare the best of 
the " Ballads " with Macaulay's " Lays," to note the dif- 
ference in both quality and execution betw^een the 
verse of a writer with a clear poetic strain in his 
temperament, and the "numbers" of a pure rhetori- 
cian. " The White Squall " is a tour de force of rhyme 

22 



THACKERAY 

and rhythm ; the " Ballad of Bouillabaisse " has a place 
in every reader's affections ; " Mr. Moloney's Account of 
the Ball " is a perpetual delight ; even " The Crystal 
Palace " is not merely clever ; and " The Pen and the 
Album " and notably the " Yanitas Yanitatum " verses 
have an elevation that is both solemn and moving — 
a sustained note of genuine lyric inspiration chanting 
gravely the burden of all the poet's prose. 

Nowhere is the special quality of his genius more 
apparent than in the admirable series of " Lectures on 
the Enghsh Humourists of the Eighteenth Century," 
which is literary criticism of a high order, but dis- 
tinctly the criticism of the novelist rather than of the 
critic. It occupies, for this reason, a place by itself. 
It is hardly such an account of the literature of the 
Augustan age as Professor Saintsbury would write. 
It quite neglects the element of literary evolution, is 
unconscious of the historical or any other method, does 
not discuss the poetic weakness of an age of prose, and 
is not based on minute and studious textual examina- 
tion of its subject but on saturation with it. Its anno- 
tation had to be left to Mr. Hannay, I believe, who 
performed the work very agreeably, and probably 
better than Thackeray would have done. From the 
point of view of literary criticism, at least of the 
scientific literary criticism of the present day, the work 
may certainly be said to have been lightly undertaken. 
The lecture on Swift ends: "We have other great 
names to mention — none I think, however, so great 

23 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

or so gloomy." The consideration of Pope begins: 
" We are now come to the greatest name on our list." 
Stella is made a natural daughter of Sir William Tem- 
ple on the authority of pure divination. The literary 
importance of Steele and Goldsmith is exaggerated, 
and that of Sterne minimized in accordance with the 
personal predilections and antipathy of the critic. 
Addison is reproached with coldness, not with com- 
monplace. One would hardly suspect that " Clarissa 
Harlowe" was a classic and Eichardson a notable 
artist, as well as a sentimental foil for "the manly, 
the English Harry Fielding " ; or that Hogarth was 
an admirable painter as well as a great humorist. The 
characters of the WTiters are the real subject of the 
series, which is an unequalled gallery of literary por- 
traits. Each one is all there. The painter may have 
treated the detail indifferently here and there, over- 
emphasized an expression, missed the full value of 
some features, but they stand out with the same vivid 
distinctness that belongs to the characters of his fiction. 
He has visualized them in the same way. One may say 
the same thing of the lectures on " The Four Georges," 
who although in the pillory in his pages, owe him their 
fame. He was, in a word, by temperament and faculty, 
first and last a novelist. 

IV 

For this reason his world is an extremely concrete 
world. His people. are the people we meet or might 

24 



THACKERAY 

^- meet ; his characters are types, not variants and ex- 
ceptions, and, accordingly, they have a human and 
social rather than a psychological interest. Thus, M. 
Scherer distinguishes him as a novelist of manners, 
contrasted with George Eliot, a novelist of character. 
The distinction, at any rate, needs this explanation, 
for it cannot be said that the characters of Thackeray 
which illustrate manners are lacking in individual in- 
terest. But they are delineated rather than dissected ; 
they are not explored clinically. They are not studied 
and scrutinized in the spirit of the scientist or the 
philosopher. And the difference is deeper than mere 
manner of artistic presentation. Tito Melema has 
something the interest of Faust or Mephistopheles. 
You seek their counterparts in your own mind. 
" Goethe found," says Emerson, " that the essence of 
this hobgoblin which had hovered in the shadow ever 
since there were men was pure intellect, applied — as 
always there is a tendency — to the service of the 
senses," and, accordingly, "flung" Mephistopheles 
"into literature." Similarly, George Eliot incarnates 
in Tito the abstraction of the spirit that shrinks from 
what is unpleasant. The reader's introspection assures 
him of his own tragic potentialities in this regard, and, 
seen through his own imagination, Tito becomes vividly 
real to him. The interest of Thackeray's Eebecca is 
of quite another kind. She is a type, a representative 
of a class, noted, fixed, observed, and described, as far 
as possible removed, in genesis, from the abstract. 

25 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

You know that Tito is going to act in direct illustra- 
tion of the principle that he almost personifies. You 
don't know at all what Eebecca is going to do next. 
Thackeray professed ignorance of what she really did, 
of how far she really went. She has the reality of 
Maggie Tulliver — a truly Thackeray an character, and 
one of the few in George Eliot that do not acquire 
their reality through an appeal to the imagination. 
Her psychology is simple enough; so is the morally 
complicated Beatrix Esmond's. The philosophy they 
illustrate is not obscure, and they give rise to very little 
speculation. 

The caricature that a character of Dickens is apt to 
be proceeds from its being a characteristic in action. 
A character of George Eliot is formed of many char- 
acteristics, fused with remarkable and sympathetic 
insight, but after all it is essentially a product of induc- 
tion. Compare one of the happiest results of this pro- 
cedure, the banker Bulstrode in " Middlemarch," with, 
say. Dr. Firmin, greatly Bulstrode's inferior in com- 
plexity, in intellectual interest. One is flesh and blood, 
the other attracts you because of the striking way in 
which moral self-sophistication is embodied. Nothing 
better attests George Eliot's scientific interest in char- 
acter than her constant exhibition of its evolution. 
This is one of her real contributions to literature. The 
effect of circumstances in developing a character like 
Lydgate, for example, the difference between Eosamond 
as she is first introduced and when she leaves the 

26 



THACKERAY 

stage, are almost Spencerian demonstrations. This, as 
Mr. Albert Dicey, I think, has observed, was an un- 
known thing in fiction when George Eliot began to 
write, and it is naturally savored by the palate of our 
day, which seeks a taste of science even in its literary 
confections. But it is needless to point out that it im- 
plies an instinct quite lacking in Thackeray, in whose 
view character is spectacle, significant spectacle, to be 
sure, and its significance often copiously insisted upon, 
but essentially spectacle, and not the illustrative incar- 
nation of interesting traits and tendencies. This is 
also Shakespeare's view, it may be added, as it is 
clearly the distinctly literary view as opposed to the 
scientific. 

The initial procedure of the human mind, however, is 
in a priori order, and the artist, like every one else, be- 
gins with ideas. We are taught at school that there 
can be no evolution without a previous involution. 
The idea underlying the world Thackeray constructed 
is the intricate moral complexity of character — an idea 
illustrated with a completeness and rehef not perhaps 
to be met with elsewhere outside of Shakespeare and 
Moliere. The personages of fiction before his time, at 
all events, are morally pretty much all of a piece. It 
is apt to be either Jones or Blifil with most writers, 
eminently so in the case of the Eomanticists, of course. 
Thackeray's absorption in the moral interest of char- 
acter is, on the other hand, naturally limiting. It ex- 
cludes, or relegates to the background, that fourth part 

27 



VICTORIAN PEOSE MASTERS 

of Hfe which remains after assigning, according to 
Arnold's formula, three fourths to conduct. Of this 
fourth, other writers — Shakespeare and Moliere among 
them — make a good deal, it need not be said. And of 
course in eschewing it — in confining himself in the 
main to character not merely in its elemental traits, 
but in its morally significant ones as well — a realist 
like Thackeray renounces a field so large and inter- 
esting as justly to have his neglect of it accounted to 
him as a limitation. The colorless characters, such as 
Tom TuUiver for a single example, in which George 
Eliot is so strong, the irresponsible ones, such as 
Dickens's Jingles and Swivellers, have few fellows in 
his fiction, from which the seriousness of his satiric 
strain excludes whatever is not significant as well as 
whatever is purely particular. The loss is very great, 
considering his world as a comMie humaine. It in- 
volves more than the elimination of psychology — it 
diminishes the number of types ; and all types are inter- 
esting, whether morally important or not. 

But in Thackeray's case it has two great compensa- 
tions. In the first place, the greater concentration it 
involves notably defines and emphasizes the net impres- 
sion of his works. It unifies their effect ; and sharply 
crystallizes the message to mankind, which, like every 
great writer, whatever branch of literature he may cul- 
tivate, it was the main business, the aim and crown 
and apology of his life to deliver. In the second place, 
it is his concentration upon the morally significant 

28 



THACKERAY 

that places him at the head of the novelists of man- 
ners. It is the moral and social quahties, of course, 
that unite men in society, and make it something other 
than the sum of the individuals composing it. Thack- 
eray's personages are never portrayed in isolation. 
They are a part of the milieu in which they exist, and 
which has itself therefore much more distinction and 
relief than an environment which is merely a frame- 
work. jHpw they regard each other, how they feel 
toward and what they think of each other, the mutual- 
ity of their very numerous and vital relations, fur- 
nishes an important strand in the texture of the story 
in which they figure. Their activities are modified by 
the air they breathe in common. Their conduct is con- 
trolled, their ideas afifected, even their desires and 
ambitions dictated, by the general ideals of the society 
that includes themTj So far as it goes, therefore, — and 
it would be easy to exaggerate its limitations, which are 
trivial in comparison, — Thackeray's picture of society 
is the most vivid, as it is incontestably the most real, 
in prose fiction, i The temperament of the artist and 
satirist combined, the preoccupation with the moral 
element in character, — and in logical sequence, with its 
human and social side, — lead naturally to the next 
step of viewing man in his relations, and the construc- 
tion of a miniature world. And in addition to the 
high place in literature won for him h y his insight into, 
^aracter, - Thackeray's social picture has given him a 
distinction that is perhaps unique. 

29 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

Furthermore, compared with the moral interest of 
character, that of its purely psychological peculiarities 
is distinctly less vital and permanent. The interest, 
for instance, of Micawber or Mantalini is inferior to 
and more transitory than that of Captain Costigan. 
Character, indeed, means moral character. As Stendhal 
puts it : " Moli^re painted with more depth than the 
other poets ; therefore he is more moral." And I have 
never heard it suggested that Thackeray's personages, 
morally considered as they are, lacked psychological 
definition — any more than those of George Eliot, who 
has the converse preoccupation, lack moral significance. 
The moral element in their portrayal adds reality and 
relief, as well as importance. Its complexity, at any 
rate, is Thackeray's theme, and he, at least, found it in- , 
exhaustible. With him no passion is simple, no motive 
unmixed. Affection is alloyed with injustice, innocence 
with selfishness, generosity with folly, love itself with 
hallucination, jealousy, and calculation. 

Nowhere is this to be so plainly noted as in his 
women, because women, being less highly differentiated 
than men, exhibit more clearly their native and ele- 
mental inconsistencies. They are the constant quantity 
in the human equation. No one ever heard of the ewig 
mdnnliches. Instances crowd the memory. Thackeray 
triumphs with equal distinction in the analysis that dis- 
covers the sound alloy in base metal and in that which 
finds dross in the most refined. Eachel Castlewood 
and her brilliant daughter, Ethel Newcome and Ke- 

30 



THACKERAY 

becca, are equally complicated. Amelia is elabo rately 
I structural compared with her namesake and prototype 
in Fielding, and any one who mistakes her for a simple 
[character has missed " Vanity Fair." But Beatrix is 
probably her creator's masterpiece. She is on a larger 
scale than Eebecca, and she is not only more splendid, 
but even less fixed and absolute. Eebecca might have 
been virtuous, as she said, on five thousand a year, but 
Beatrix had infinite possibilities and at any" moment 
might have realized them. It is largely due to her 
that " The Virginians," fine as it is in wealth of inci- 
dent and variety of character, ranks with the great 
novels rather than with " Philip," or even with what 
we can divine " Denis Duval " would have proved had 
Thackeray lived to complete it. 

" Esmond " is not the greatest of the novels ; it is the 
most perfect. Thackeray was quite right in calling it 
" the very best that I can do," and speaking of leaving 
it behind him as his card. A writer judges of his own 
work preferably as an artist, and as an artist his aim is 
to please and his effort is for flawlessness. Both in 
conception and in workmanship, " Esmond " is well-nigh 
flawless. Mr. Lowell found a modern locution in it, I 
believe, and TroUope accepted, rather priggishly, Thack- 
eray's assertion that Esmond himself was a bit of a 
prig. But it has fewer flaws probably than any work 
of either its kind or its scale ever written. It is as a 
novel what the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " is as a poem. 
The archaism of its style is far more than, quite other 

31 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

than, a literary feat. It is a sustained and complete 
illusion, an envelope of atmosphere in which the story- 
rests exquisitely transfigured. The plot is always 
praised for its perfection; the story is developed with 
harmonious and tranquil art ; the element of beauty is 
everywhere prominent in it. It contains some of 
Thackeray's rarest writing — in passages like that re- 
lating Esmond's visit to the convent cemetery at Brus- 
sels, in the entire chapter called " The 29th December." 
The beauty of Beatrix is the mainspring of the book's 
action ; that of her mater pidchra is a softened and 
spiritualized parallel. The very fragrance of romance 
perfumes the air at Castlewood ; the tone of quiet, of 
refinement, of elevation is so perfectly preserved that 
one of Philip Firmin's laughs, one of old Major Penden- 
nis's worldly harangues, the sound of Lady Kew's voice, 
would be a jar. It is Thackeray's artistic — perhaps 
one may rather say his poetic — masterpiece. But if it 
were his only work, or its vein his only vein, Thackeray 
would mean far less to us than he does. There are 
devotees of art who prefer " The Blithedale Eomance " 
to " The Scarlet Letter," but their view is an esoteric 
view, and as Hawthorne's fame does not rest mainly on 
his most artistic performance, so Thackeray's is as 
firmly established on the other three members of " the 
great quadrilateral " (as, with " Esmond," " Vanity 
Fair," " Pendennis," and " The Newcomes " have been 
called) as on " Esmond " itself. Life is a larger thing 
than art, and perhaps no rounded and perfect synthesis 

32 



THACKERAY 

gives the sense of it quite as well as a representation 
that images its inequalities. 

It is this sense of life that rules in the books just 
mentioned. It appears in its intensity in " Vanity 
Fair," in its variety in " The Newcomes," in its im- 
mitigability in " Pendennis," with a definiteness and 
reality to be found elsewhere only in the few great 
classics of literature. The tension of " Vanity Fair " is 
almost oppressive. The first-fruits of Thackeray's ma- 
turity, after the Titmarsh period, and coming as it did 
into the world of fiction occupied by the writers bur- 
lesqued in the " Novels by Eminent Hands," its substi- 
tution of truth for convention had something almost 
fierce in it. The title alone, the few words " Before the 
Curtain," the last paragraph of the book, pointed its 
felicity of extreme pertinence, and any one could see 
that a new power in fiction had arisen. But it is not 
its satiric force that has preserved it. It has the peren- 
nial interest of fundamental spontaneity, and its tinge of 
Juvenalian color merely accentuates its positive and con- 
structive quality. Life in it is tremendously real, what- 
ever its goal. It is not a fairy-tale, and things are fax 
from what they seem. Any episode or incident or sub- 
ordinate character of the story shares its intensity. The 
unedifying career of Jos Sedley, for example, is grimly 
vital. I remember no book which is, like "Vanity 
Fair," a portrayal of life rather than purely a satire 
that is so free from triviality. 

"Pendennis" is a different picture altogether. It 
33 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

is pervaded by a blander air, but the sense of life in 
it is as distinct as in its intenser predecessor. With 
greater elaboration and ampler illustration it shows 
the weight that life imposes on the human struggle 
for the attainment of ideals as such, the idleness of 
combating it, the necessity of compromise, the unique 
safety of humility in the presence of its overwhelm- 
ing pressure, the dignity and importance of it, which 
become tyranny in antagonism, and are only to be con- 
verted into allies by preserving an attitude of modesty 
and respect. Life and the world are different things, 
and doubtless when " the world is too much with us " 
we miss life in its largest sense. But this is a triter 
moral than that of " Pendennis," which illustrates on the 
other hand the philistinism of the protestant and the 
non-conformist as vividly as the pharisaism of worldli- 
ness. Life is not a simple thing ; its prizes are either 
unattainable or less desirable than they seem from a 
distance ; there are far fewer of them than youth be- 
lieves ; the problem of existence is prodigiously com- 
plicated ; it has to be reckoned with, and largely on 
its own terms. The essence of the book is in the 
famous talk between Pen and Warrington. Nothing 
can be deeper than the lesson of Warrington's failure. 
Life has been too much for him ; he has found it im- 
mitigable, as I said; but it has left him neverthe- 
less at the true centre of things. Pen comes back 
to Laura at last after both wandering and soaring. 
The end is repose in the haven, not a career of tri- 

34 



THACKERAY 

umph. " When duty whispers low, ' Thou must/ the 
youth replies, 'I can,'" in Emerson's tonic words. 
But the wise youth's reply must be whispered as low 
as duty's command, and let him not fancy he is 
greatly forwarded by his ability, or is other than an 
infinitesimal part of the life of the world, which en- 
compasses him completely, if haply it does not oppress 
his energies and render them as futile as they seemed 
to Swift and St. Augustine. 

As for "The Newcomes," it is an epitome of human 
life in its manifold variety of social and individual 
phases unmatched, I think, in fiction. Its range is 
extraordinary for the thread of a single story to follow. 
Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are 
numerous and varied. It is Thackeray's largest can- 
vas, and it is fiUed with the greatest ease and to the 
borders. It stands incontestably at the head of the 
novels of manners. And it illustrates manners with 
an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of 
which, without repetition or confusion, without digres- 
sion or discord, exhibits the control of the artist 
equally with the imaginative and creative faculty of 
the poet — the "maker." The framework of "The 
Newcomes " would include three or four of Balzac's 
most elaborate books, which, compared with it, indeed, 
seem like studies and episodes, lacking the large body 
and ample current of Thackeray's epic. And its epic 
scale is preserved, not in mechanically assembled ex- 
amples of different kinds of mere existence, high and 

35 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

low, savage and civilized, but in a picture of life itself 
flowering variously in varied characters and circles and 
communities, closely connected by the cousinly bond 
of the humanity they possess in common. 

Taken as a whole, it is true, Thackeray's human 
comedy is less comprehensive than Balzac's, with 
which alone it is to be compared in the world of prose 
fiction. Taken as a whole, it lacks that appearance 
of vastness and variety which Balzac's has, and per- 
haps the appearance in such a matter answers as weU 
as the reality. Considered, that is to say, purely as a 
world of the imagination, Thackeray's is the more cir- 
cumscribed. But it is born of less travail; it is con- 
structed with the effortless ease of greater spontaneity ; 
its preliminary simplification has been carried farther ; 
and, if less complicated and ingenious, less speculative 
and suggestive, it is far more real. Its philosophy is 
more human, more winning, more attaching, and in 
a very deep sense more profound. The note of arti- 
ficiality, the fly in Balzac's ointment, the weak point 
in his superb equipment, never appears in Thackeray. 
His charm is infinitely greater. His power is rendered 
at least equivalent by its conjunction with the sim- 
plicity that Balzac lacks. And his narrower range is 
perhaps to be ascribed to his lesser absorption, per- 
haps to the less varied and more conventional world 
that he had to depict. At any rate, it proceeds from 
no inferiority to his great contemporary and compeer 
in native equipment and vital force for the specific 

36 



THACKERAY 



work of the novelist — the portrayal of the play of 
human forces, inspired and directed by searching 
scrutiny of the human heart. 



Thackekay is said to have remarked of himself 
that he had no head above his eyes. It might be con- 
tended that with such eyes as his he needed none. 
But the statement is misleading. It is true that he 
had no talent for abstract thinking, for abstruse 
philosophy. But to assume that he has no philosophy 
would be to ignore the significance of one of the most 
definite and complete syntheses of human phenomena 
that have ever been made, and a synthesis, moreover, 
incomparably buttressed by the acutest analysis and 
the most copious illustration. He does not stimulate 
thought, in the sense of speculation, so much as he 
arouses reflection. His ideas are moral ideas rather 
than metaphysical — the ideas for which Voltaire eu- 
logized English poetry. And he deals with them 
powerfully, cogently, winningly, rather than refining 
upon them and following out their evolution as a dis- 
interested exercise of the mind. They are the ideas, 
too, that inspire human motives and govern human 
action in familiar life and in the individual, that con- 
tribute to the making or unmaking of character — his 
chief preoccupation — rather than to the development 
of the intelligence. He is not a sociologist like Bal- 

37 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

zac; he is not interested in currents and movements 
of thought ; he is not devoted to what are called gen- 
eral ideas as such. Matthew Arnold calls the Master 
of Eavenswood " by far the most interesting of Scott's 
characters because the spirit of fatality seems to set its 
mark on him from the first." Thackeray's reference 
to this rather invertebrate personage is, " I have never 
cared for the Master of Eavenswood or fetched his hat 
out of the water since he dropped it there when I last 
met him {circa 1825)." Nothing could better illustrate 
two opposite ways of looking at the world of life and 
art. The concrete illustration of ideas in character is 
what interests Thackeray and what he interests us 
with. But in this his interest and his power of inter- 
esting us are hardly to be measured. AVhen he is 
called a "realist" something more is — consciously or 
vaguely — meant than that his novels are pictures of 
life rather than classic or romantic compositions. It 
is meant that his philosophy is realistic — that is to 
say, based on the data furnished by the perceptive 
faculties, faculties which in his case, it cannot be too 
often repeated, were of amazing sharpness. There is 
no missing the tenor of his gospel, which is that char- 
acter is the one thing of importance in life ; that it is 
tremendously complex, and the easiest thing in the 
world to misconceive both in ourselves and in others ; 
that truth is the one instrument of its perfecting, and 
the one subject worthy of pursuit ; and that the study 
of truth discloses littlenesses and futilities in it at its 



THACKERAY 

best for which the only cloak is charity, and the only 
consolation and atonement the cultivation of the 
affections. 

"There is life and death going on in everything, 
truth and lies always at battle. Pleasure is always 
warring against self-restraint ; doubt is always crying 
' Pshaw ! ' and sneering. A man in life, a humorist in 
writing about life, sways over to one principle or the 
other and laughs with the reverence for right and the 
love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these from the 
other side. ... I cannot help telling the truth as I 
view it, and describing what I see. To describe it 
otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood to 
that calhng in which it has pleased Heaven to place 
me, treason to that conscience which says that men are 
weak, that truth must be told, that fault must be 
owned, that pardon must be prayed for, and that love 
reigns supreme over all." 

That is Thackeray's philosophy in small compass. 
There is nothing very new about it. It is as old, 

" Here at St. Peter's of Cornhill, 
As yonder on the Mount of Hermon." 

It is simply the natural truth underlying the dogma 
and informing the spirit of Christianity. The force 
that overthrew the civilization of the ancient world 
was certainly an overwhelming movement of spiritual 
feeling, and since then philosophy has had to reckon, 
at all events, with the soul as well as with the mind. 

39 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

If Thackeray had no head above his eyes, he had at 
least a heart below them, and the fact is a controlling 
influence in his philosophy. " Sure love vincit omnia" 
exclaims Colonel Esmond in a familiar passage, and 
the principle is everywhere fundamental in Thackeray's 
"realistic" scheme of things — not love between the 
sexes necessarily, nor particularly in any of its mani- 
festations, but love as the universal principle to which 
true salvation is inseparably attached. Humor is " wit 
and love," in his definition. Love is the inspiration of 
the "awe" and "reverence" and "tenderness" he is 
constantly celebrating, of the humihty and simplicity 
he incarnates in his winning characters, as the lack of 
it is the weakness of his reprehensible ones. He re- 
volts from Swift because he "placards himself as a 
professional hater of his own kind . . . the suffering, 
the weak, the erring, the wicked, if you will, but still 
the friendly, the loving children of God our Father." 
Although quarrelling with Dickens's art "a thousand 
and a thousand times," as he says, he recognizes in 
Dickens's genius "a commission from that divine 
beneficence whose blessed task we know it will one 
day be to wipe every tear from every eye." Hood's 
" Song of the Shirt " is to him " a great act of charity 
to the world." His gospel is Voltaire's apotheosis of 
good sense, plus heart. If his good sense is not as 
cheery and unfailing as Voltaire's, if fault and weak- 
ness were ever present with him, and, humanly speak- 
ing, the futility of all things impresses him more 

40 



THACKERAY 

deeply than it does minds of perfect sanity, if there 
is a touch of melancholy in his mirth and the tem- 
peramental reaction follows the indulgence of his 
highest spirits, he regains his philosophic equilibrium 
always by instinctive reference to his just as clearly 
perceived principle of the love which, as he says, 
" reigns supreme over all." It is open to any one to 
object to this philosophy as trite, but it is at least a 
philosophy, and Thackeray's philosophic force and 
originality consist in his rediscovering it for himself, 
in his making it his own in virtue of basing his ad- 
herence to it on his own experience and observation, 
in the sureness of his reliance upon it after an abso- 
lutely candid and wonderfully searching examination of 
the data of human life, and in the convincing elo- 
quence with which his inductions therefrom bring its 
soundness and sweetness home to the thinking reader. 



VI 

Whatever judgment of Thackeray's art and sub- 
stance proves final, there is no doubt that the contem- 
porary verdict of his style will stand. " Thackeray is 
not, I think, a great writer," Matthew Arnold observed, 
but at any rate his style is that of one. What a great 
writer is, in his view, Arnold has formulated in his 
remark that " the problem is to express new and pro- 
found ideas in a perfectly sound and classical style," 
and his refusal to recognize in Addison a writer of the 

41 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

first rank is based on " the commonplace of his ideas." 
It is idly possible to call Thackeray's ideas common- 
place, but his style is at all events perfectly sound and 
classical. It is not the style of Burke, whom Arnold 
calls " our greatest English prose- writer " — probably 
because, together with his incomparable style, Burke's 
distinction is, as he says, that he saturates politics with 
thought. It is, however, far more perfectly sound and 
classical. Burke's elevation does not wholly save his 
style from that tincture of rhetoric wliich is the vice of 
English style in general — that rhetorical color which is 
so clearly marked in the contentious special pleading of 
Macaulay, in the exaltation of Carlyle, in the rhapsody 
of Euskin, in the periodic stateliness of Gibbon, and 
even in the dignity of Jeremy Taylor. Thackeray's is 
as destitute of this element as Swift's or Addison's, 
with which, of course, it is rather to be compared. 
Ehetoric means the obvious ordering of language with 
a view to effect — when it does not spring from the ele- 
mentary desire simply to relieve one's mind; and the 
great merit of the Queen Anne writers — from whom 
Thackeray derives — is their freedom from this element 
of artistic mediocrity. It is to this turn for elegance 
rather than rhetoric — as unfortunate perhaps in its 
poetry as beneficial in its prose — that the Queen Anne 
age owes its epithet Augustan. Thackeray is undoubt- 
edly to be classed with the world's elegant writers — 
the writers of whom Virgil may stand as the type and 
exemplar, the writers who demand and require cultiva- 

42 



THACKERAY 

tion in the reader in order to be understood and en- 
joyed. " Nobody in our day wrote, I should say, with 
such perfection of style," Carlyle affirmed, and, as 
Thackeray observes of Gibbon's praise of Fielding, 
" there can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great 
judge," in such a matter. His taste is sure. In this 
respect some of his writing is like a page of Plato. One 
may feel shortcomings, but at its best it is without 
faults. The vulgarian can see that it is flawless, lack- 
ing as it may be in the glitter or the rhythm that ex- 
cites his imagination and quickens his pulse. 

Among all its traits simplicity has, no doubt, the > 
most relief. It has the simplicity that attends the 
expression of any natural gift for the expression of 
which the artist who possesses it seems, as we say, 
expressly born. It is the simphcity of both birth 
and breeding, and it is in virtue of it that Thack- 
eray is so often said to write like a gentleman. This is 
the way in which every one should write, one reflects, 
just as the discerning but unlearned critic desired all 
painters to paint with the directness of Titian. It is 
the opposite, in this respect, of what we mean by the 
professional style. Its repetitions are not mannerisms. 
They are the natural expression of the idea and recur- 
rent with it. The language shares the felicity of the 
thought and fuses with it, instead of lending the thought 
a felicity of its own. One enjoys the limpidity of Ar- 
nold, the liquidness of Newman, as evident properties 
of the medium in which they write, but in Thackeray 

43 



VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

you are less conscious of the medium. His language 
produces the effect of richness by its fulness rather than 
by scrupulous selection of epithet and the effort after 
plasticity. It always has this peculiar sense of fulness, 
of words overflowing from an exhaustless store, of 
expressions natively combined. Its ease is absolutely 
effortless. It is like Eaphael's line. He can make it 
say anything he chooses, anything his characters choose 
in their several dialects. In the words of a recent 
writer, himself conspicuously endowed in point of style, 
Mr. Max Beerbohm : " He blew on his pipe, and words 
came tripping round him, like children, like pretty lit- 
tle children who are perfectly drilled for the dance ; or 
came, did he will it, treading in their precedence, like 
kings, gloomily." The measure of his style is not the 
result of restriction, but the contained expression of 
native reserve. In passages of most concentrated feel- 
ing, such as Esmond's tirade to the prince at Castle- 
wood, it is as free as when it is employed in leisurely 
narrative. It not only never forces the note of declama- 
tion or dithyramb, but it never runs away with the 
writer and leads him on into exercise of his gift for its 
own delectability. It follows closely the play of his 
mind instead of itself ever fascinating his fancy. And 
though its most notable trait is simplicity — its sensitive 
avoidance of the meretricious, its elegance, in a word — 
what gives it its unique distinction is its color. 

And its color is directly derived from the constant 
and active influence of the personality of the writer. 

44 



THACKERAY 

In Thackeray's case the style is eminently the man. 
Addison's elegance is the elegance of colorlessness. 
Swift's directness and power are clothed in a garb 
whose simplicity eschews the play of personal quaUty 
in any highly developed texture. Eighteenth-century 
standards discountenanced idiosyncratic expression. 
But idiosyncratic expression is the marked distinction 
of Thackeray's style, which translates his mood as 
directly as his thought and expresses how he feels as 
well as what he thinks. It has had imitators, but to 
imitate it any one must assume, for the time being, 
Thackeray's frame of mind and sentimental attitude, 
just as to speak French well it is necessary to think like 
a Frenchman. And its imitators have been few in 
number and not lucky in preserving much personal 
force of their own — so completely has their imitation 
involved the merging of their personalities in that of 
their model, the overmastering quality of which as an 
element of style is thus eloquently attested. The variety 
and range of his style, which are extraordinary, answer 
exactly to the range and variety of his own thought 
and feeling and share his extraordinary vitality and in- 
terest in all sides of every subject. No one has so 
light a touch and no one can stir us so deeply, leaving 
the nerves unassailed. He speaks happily of " a flash 
of Swift's lightning," or "a gleam of Addison's pure 
sunshine " extinguishing the " tawdry play-house taper" 
of Congreve. But he himself combines flashes of light- 
ning, gleams of pure sunshine — yes, and very pretty 

45 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

play-house illumination now and then — in virtue of a 
wider interest and quicker sympathies than these 
Augustan worthies possessed. And not only is he him- 
self the source of the color of his style: he is the source 
also of its sustained quality. His style is adapted to 
the largest as well as to cabinet canvases because it is 
the natural expression of his own largeness of view and 
depth of feehng, instead of being the result of some 
rhetorical penchant, or the anxious education of illus- 
trating some idea of energy, clearness, cogency, or what- 
not. No one would ever have wondered of him, as 
Jeffrey did of Macaulay, where he "picked up" his 
style. Like his art and like the world of his imagina- 
tion, it is an outgrowth of the most interesting person- 
ality, perhaps, that has expressed itself in prose. 



46 



CAELYLE 



CAELYLE 



When Carlyle died, over twenty years ago, he already 
belonged to the past. His philosophy was of a general 
order that had ceased to be popular. And he had been 
long silent. The papers on the Early Norse Kings were 
unimportant. The last of his utterances that lingered 
in people's memory were his defence of Eyre, the "Ihas 
in Nuce," and the " Shooting Niagara and After," re- 
calling the earlier " Latter-Day Pamphlets." The im- 
pression they left was not an agreeable one, and it was 
hardly modified by the amenity and gentleness of his 
Edinburgh Address, in which he apologized very sim- 
ply for the tone of some of them, though asserting still 
that they were " very deeply my convictions." In this 
country especially he had few friends. With us in 
general he seemed, as he was long ago described, " the 
leading prophet of Absolutism, Toryism, Slavery." We 
had issued from what he called our " nigger agony " in 
a mood that hardly stimulated us to the difficult effort 
of impartially appreciating one who had contemptu- 
ously misunderstood us — not indeed feeling such an 
effort very incumbent on us. But neither here nor in 

49 



Pm 



VICTORIAN PKOSE MASTERS 

England probably was the public prepared for the 
revelations of Froude that so promptly followed — the 
depressing " Eeminiscences," as if they had been wait- 
g for the signal — upon Carlyle's death. The " Eem- 
iniscences " and the volumes that succeeded them gave, 
in many quarters apparently, the coup de grdce to Car- 
lyle's vogue. Vogue of their own they notoriously had 
in a true succh de scandale, and Carlyle's friends could 
only denounce his chosen executor and biographer. 
But this was of course extremely transient, and the 
result was an immense weariness with the whole sub- 
ject. Carlyle's own writings fell speedily into a neg- 
lect as complete probably as has ever happened to a 
writer of anything like his power. 

The neglect has continued. Such questions as have 
occupied popular attention are either not questions on 
which Carlyle's works have any particular and specific 
bearing — questions of art, of poetry, of science ; or else 
they are questions invariably discussed on lines and in 
a spirit wholly foreign to his. It is the day of the 
specialist, whose syntheses are left to spontaneous com- 
bination ; of the realist, whose material is also his end ; 
of the practical philosopher, who relegates the services 
of the deductive method to pure metaphysic. Creeds, 
too, in Mr. Leslie Stephen's acute phrase, are " expiring 
of explanation," and therefore to point out their essential 
residuum is a less pungent proceeding than when it 
seemed as if this residuum were certain to share their 
fate in the absence of vigorous protest. Much of what 

50 



CARLYLE 

Carlyle wrote, the gospel that he expounded so conten- 
tiously and polemically, has now become a part of 
what we now call our subliminal possessions. What 
once seemed, and of course still is, elemental, has be- 
come elementary as well. And Hterary manners, as 
they may be termed, have undergone a notable trans- 
formation and the taste for contentiousness and po- 
lemics, especially in the exposition of the elementary, 
has largely disappeared. Criticism itself has become 
largely impersonal and anything like a body of doctrine 
in a critic's works seems if novel an impertinence, and 
if familiar mere surplusage, to a public that, whether 
wiser or more superficial, has grown greatly more civil- 
ized. 

It is, however, difficult to beheve that the current 
neglect of Carlyle will continue indefinitely. For 
whatever else may be said about it, his work is litera- 
ture. In the first place, its style must be preservative, 
as style always is in a very considerable degree. The 
" Spectator," for example, will always be read, though 
not for the reasons that recommended it to Macaulay. 
And whimsical and artificial as Carlyle's style is, at 
least in excess, it is too vital not to be viable. It is 
idle to suppose that the current impassiveness, which 
has succeeded to the earlier impatience with his 
eccentricities and violences, will endure in the pres- 
ence of such prose as distinguishes the "Life of 
Sterling " throughout, the " Past and Present " largely, 
and, in parts, especially the "Sartor Eesartus." In 

51 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

the next place, it is hardly to be supposed that such 
a sustained exposition, at once symmetrical and multi- 
farious, of the spiritual side of things, such a prolonged 
eulogy and aggrandizement of the spiritual forces of 
life and the world, is likely to suffer permanent eclipse. 
As the English-reading public becomes more and more 
civilized, more curious, less emotional, the energy which 
in Carlyle's early days attracted it and which later in 
the light of its own advance seemed to it mere sav- 
agery, will drop into its proper perspective and be 
appreciated without the agitation inseparable from con- 
temporary contemplation of anything so accentuated as 
Carlyle's indubitable genius. For, finally, his genius is 
incontestable, and it is a genius of incomparable power. 
His work is everywhere penetrated with the power of 
a prodigious personality of which the literature he 
produced is the native, adequate, concentrated and con- 
summate expression. Such a sovereign force must 
survive the current neglect which its extravagances 
have nevertheless abundantly earned for it. 



II 

It is curious to read in Froude's biography of the 
confidence in his powers felt by Carlyle himself, and 
shared by every one around him years before he had 
done anything to justify it. His wife married him, 
she says, " for ambition," when his career was all before 
him and when the little that he had accomplished was 

52 



CARLYLE 

altogether disproportionate to the time he had been 
about it. His family, one and all, looked up to him 
even when he was a very young man, and although 
they could not understand him and were not of a sort 
to be impressed by any literary glamour. From his 
early days till very nearly the end of his life he was 
the centre of every group he happened to be in. He 
was a prodigious talker, and on occasion drowned op- 
position, but in general every one else was content to 
listen to him. He met intimately nearly all the best 
men of his day and his personal primacy was never 
disputed. Every one felt his power as extraordinary 
and as something other than force. There was appar- 
ently nothing he could not grasp, if he would. His 
views on all sorts of subjects were delivered with ac- 
knowledged ex cathedra authority. The authority of 
others, even the highest, failed to impose itself on him. 
From the first he judged men, even the most cele- 
brated, not only with perfect independence, but with 
the confidence born of the consciousness of unusual 
powers. The personalities that he venerated were ex- 
clusively historic — excepting Goethe, who was a for- 
eigner. He had no deference — except for what was 
wholly outside of competition with him ; his father's 
character, for example. Awe and reverence for the 
Creator and His universe considered as a stupendous 
miracle left him free to alternate compassion with con- 
tempt for His creatures. 

There are few of even the greatest men in whom 
53 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

such conspicuous conceit has been so curiously con- 
doned. His confidence in his capacities, however his 
expression may now and then have failed to please 
him, is in a way an attestation of them. It imposes 
on us. One feels that had it been less justified it 
would have been less keenly felt. He was quite sin- 
cere about it and his penetration is acute enough to 
trust even about himself. But it is plainly too much 
in evidence. At times his self-satisfaction is positively 
smug. And it is responsible for much popular and un- 
reflecting disesteem of him. The conventional reader 
to whom modesty is the invariable concomitant of 
merit, strong in his commonplaces, shakes his head 
sceptically. The " Keminiscences " and Fronde's vol- 
umes quite scandalized him. The " Eeminiscences " 
are, indeed, a revelation of self-esteem and depreciation 
of others that it would be hard to equal. A single re- 
mark like that about "The Origin of Species," which 
Carlyle says illustrated for him only "the capricious 
stupidity of mankind ; never could read a page of it or 
waste the least thought upon it," is a sufficient charac- 
terization of them in this respect. 

Neither humor nor dyspepsia can explain or excuse 
the outrageousness of much of his writings of which 
such a statement is typical. What does explain it is 
the extraordinary self-consciousness with which his 
conceit is associated — his egoism. Egoism was never, 
perhaps, illustrated in such completeness, such perfec- 
tion. He himself, quite as eminently deserved the 

54 



CARLYLE 

epithet "poor, skinless creature" that he applied to 
Rousseau. " Perhaps none of you could do what I am 
doing," he reflects bitterly, viewing the Hyde Park pro- 
cession of dignities. The observation was true enough 
but why was it not too trite for him to make and'to 
record ? It is the railing of the peasant at the patri- 
cian panorama. Even in his most objective writings 
he never gets away from himself. His personality 
confuses his history. You are never allowed to escape 
from It. It IS obtrusive, exasperating, domineering. 
Ihe simplest record is complicated with his view of 
the facts. In his "Frederick," for example, he divides 
attention with his hero; he is incessantly- weari- 
somely -parading his views, preaching his gospel, even 
complaining, now humorously, now querulously, always 
superfluously, of the difficulties of his task; pervading 
the scene, in short, with his extremely accentuated 
personahty. His ideal of "unconsciousness" in the 
famous essay on "Characteristics" has its origin no 
doubt, in the exasperation of his egoism, which obsessed 
him and under which he chafed and fretted till soothed by 
conceit. Introspection irritated him supremely and made 
him long for the automatic play of faculty, which he ac- 
cordmglygeneralized into a millennial principle of mental 
activity. But his introspection never led him beyond 
self-consciousness into self-discipliue - the compensa- 
tion which its inevitability m the modern world has for 
less egoistic spirits. Discipline in thought, feehng, and 
expression is the one thing he conspicuously neglected 

55 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

For with his extraordinary powers and his self- 
consciousness, wilfulness is certainly to be connected 
as the next most salient trait of his commanding per- 
sonality. "The most shining avatar of whim the 
world has ever seen," Lowell calls him quite truly. 
Only, " whim " is too extenuated a term — or too de- 
preciatory, if one chooses — to apply to an element of 
so much energy. His surrender to whim is so volun- 
tary, so absolute, such a sin against light, that to call 
him merely "our whimsical philosopher," as Mr. John 
Morley does, is both patronizing and inadequate. 
With him caprice means not intellectual frivolity, but 
a temperamental perversity of which he is the willing 
slave. He will say anything that inclination or even 
temper suggests to him. " Once more the tragic story 
of a high endowment with an insufficient will," he says 
of Coleridge. It is the exaggerated "sufficiency" of 
his will on the contrary that renders the story of his 
own high endowment quite as tragic. It is singularly 
tragic that owing to it the weightiest utterances of his 
splendid genius should be so often robbed of the intel- 
lectual responsibility that alone confers authority. 

All this we knew, however, before the revelations 
of Froude. Froude's fatal contribution to our knowl- 
edge of his master is the disclosure of his lovelessness. 
The genial basis that theretofore might credibly have 
been inferred beneath the various phases of his con- 
tradictory and prevailing "humor" now appears as a 
certain aridity of soul. One can hardly avoid the con- 

56 



CARLYLE 

elusion — his biographer has so copiously documented 
his own explicitness about it — that he did not know 
what love is, that he had never experienced the sensa- 
tion of it in either its tension or its transports, its 
energy or its enervation. The remorse in the refer- 
ences to his wife in the " Eeminiscences " is so intoler- 
ably pathetic because it witnesses in truly fatalistic 
fashion a fundamental incapacity. His feeling for his 
family is very fine ; but it illustrates a kind of ethnic 
devotion to the clan and has a side of very subtly 
vicarious selfishness quite removed from the "leaving 
of self " that love is. He was naively ready to sacrifice 
his wife to it. He was quite ready in fact to let her 
go if she had any doubts about her vocation as his wife. 
It is small wonder that philanthropy meant nothing to 
him, that service of any kind did not attract him, that 
his heroes, however admirable, are never winning. 
The affections never retarded, deflected, or stimulated 
him in his steady march to distinction. Distinction, 
too, was undisguisedly, even professedly, his aim and 
end, as much as it ever was that of any of his brother 
Scots who had victoriously invaded the " mad Babylon " 
of London. It was his "mission" — the whole of it. 
Only, in achieving it, he never had the slightest temp- 
tation to seek it on any terms but his own. Ap- 
parently he never had any temptations of any kind. 
Duty and desire were curiously interconvertible terms 
to him. He Lived a Life of ideal integrity, of blameless 
conduct, of complete consecration to the development. 

57 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

and functional expression of his extraordinary powers. 
But his nearest approach to passion is petulance, except 
when he is occupied with reprehension or reproof. 
Who ever thinks of " the storms and tempests of his 
furious mind," or conceives of him as " Miserrimus," or 
finds that " his laugh jars on one's ear " — as Thackeray 
says of Swift ? His laugh, indeed, however boisterous, 
was largely reflex, one suspects after reading Froude — 
genuine enough, no doubt, but hardly "infectious." 
Passion implies the state of being " beside one's self," 
and though clearly a Titan, and a wofuUy wilful one, 
Carlyle's truly Scotch self-possession is distinctly canny. 
His temperamental tumultuousness was singularly intel- 
lectual. It is his thinking, not himself, that is agitated. 
He could never, he says, do any long-continued, " de- 
cisive intellectual operation" without getting "decid- 
edly made ill by it." And perhaps the exclusiveness 
with which his mind monopolized his feeling is at once 
the most characteristic trait of his personality and the 
most determining characteristic of his work. 



Ill 

One of the tragedies of the strenuous intellectual life 
is the disproportion between its conclusions and their 
cost. So much struggle in the pursuit of mere simpli- 
fication, so much apologetics for so concise a credo, 
such a wide waste of philosophizing for such a circum- 
scribed foothold of faith, such a sea of speculation 

58 



CARLYLE 

through which to reach so narrow a strand of cer- 
tainty ! To arrive at his not complex philosophy Car- 
lyle passed through a prodigious amount of thinking ; 
demon-driven and tempest-tossed in the process. His 
own account of his abandonment of traditional religious 
dogmas is acutely pathetic — an account of a Titanic 
experience with issue of hardly corresponding impor- 
tance, one may say. It was not a chastening experi- 
ence. It left him intolerant even to the point of ex- 
acting an equivalent one of others, which shows that it 
had not, in old-fashioned phraseology, been " sanctified 
to his use." He reproaches Coleridge contemptuously 
for having merely " skirted the howling deserts of in- 
fidelity." His own " firm lands of faith beyond " were 
substantially Coleridge's country, however. His title 
to them was really his belief in the superiority of the 
Vernunft or reason to the Verstand or understanding, 
as he often explicitly says ; though, unhampered as al- 
ways by a sense of chivalry, he ridicules it as mere ap- 
paratus when his business is to exhibit the vagueness of 
Coleridge. He resented Coleridge's complacent placid- 
ity. The remark that " Socrates is terribly at ease in 
Zion " is doubtless accurately ascribed to him. He would 
probably have grumbled at the good fortune of the 
penitent thief. His own salvation had been so hardly 
won that he prescribed the purgatory of agonized men- 
tal conflict as a preliminary to the paradise of settled 
conviction. His bitter experience, too, in a measure, 
explains the vehemence with which he held his con- 

59 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

victions. They were not very recondite, as I say. 
Fronde's attempt to construct an extraordinary esoteric 
credo for him, out of some disjecta memoranda he had 
himself discarded, is extraordinarily inept, and reduces 
to a belief in God and the universe as His expression. 
" The light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration 
of the Almighty," is the criterion, indifference to happi- 
ness the basis, and " work not wages " the end, of his 
philosophy. 

This substantially sufficed him in the way of philo- 
sophical baggage. But the energy with which he 
preached exclusively this rather exiguous gospel shows 
that it was the residuum of heroic — and perhaps to 
most men unnecessary — sacrifices. Energy, however, 
not intellectual complexity, distinguishes him — energy 
even more than its direction. He never even addresses 
the intellect pure and simple. His appeal is to the 
heart and the soul. For example, in the countless 
changes he rings upon his central idea of the un worthi- 
ness of happiness as a motive — and the eloquence, the 
convincingness, the fire and intoxicating, magnetic 
cogency with which he does this gives him his place 
in the classic pantheon — he never, so far as I remem- 
ber, calls attention to what is now termed (in a jargon 
he would scout) the hedonistic paradox. The reason- 
ableness of the statement of this phenomenon by Jesus, 
" He that loveth his life shall lose it," is quite foreign 
to the Hebraic spirit of his treatment of the general 
theme. He does not make you ponder its mystic and 

60 



CARLYLE 

significant import. In fact, he never makes his reader 
ponder at all. He arouses the sensibilities and the will 
directly by an energy of pronouncement, adjuration, 
irony that sets the sympathetic in responsive vibration 
with the definite ideal of duty, of sacrifice, of perform- 
ance, of abnegation, so intensely felt and so masterfully 
set forth. 

The traces of his perturbation are to be found, too, 
in the character of this ideal, which though definite 
enough is hardly to be called positive. At least, it 
lacks — tragically — aspiration. Its end, its haven, its 
heaven is rest, not activity. " That is how I figure 
Heaven," he said once substantially, " just rest." This 
is carrying the " Entbehren sollst du " very far, farther 
than Buddhism, whose inspiration is certainly not fa- 
tigue. " Eest " is not even " calm," the partial and 
temperamental ideal of old age, while youth 

" — hears a voice within it tell : 
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well." 

It implies the weariness of exhaustion, the sense of de- 
feat. As an ideal it is warped by agitation. That it 
should have appealed so strongly to readers influenced 
by Carlyle indicates strikingly the demoralization 
wrought among pious souls by the break-up of the old 
faiths. But it is still more eloquent witness of the 
power of his energetic preachment of the irrelevance 
of the whole matter of reward for duty done. St. Paul's 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

insistence upon the expectation of immortality and his 
wish not to have his disciples sorrow " even as others 
who are without hope" has been much exaggerated. 
And this expectation itself has been greatly overesti- 
mated, probably, as a selfish motive of virtuous per- 
formance peculiar to fanaticism and contrasting with 
Stoic nobility. " It is a calumny on men to say that 
they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleas- 
ure, recompense, sugar-plums of any kind, in this world 
or the next," says Carlyle of Mahomet's success. 
" Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the 
allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the 
inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up 
all lower considerations." None the less, to have kin- 
dled this flame in so many breasts in a rational age, 
and by preaching the foregoing " allurements " alone, 
without even recognition of the fact that they carry 
their recompense with them, and without the elevation 
and expansion either involved in the gaudmm certaminis 
itself or attendant on victory in it here or hereafter, 
attests wonderfully both the intensity and the kindling 
quality of the preacher's emotional eqiiipment. 

Carlyle's intensity of feeling, however, not only out- 
strips his thinking and thus itself dies out long before 
the manifestations of it have lost their momentum, so 
that these come to seem almost mechanical, often, be- 
fore they suddenly cease in some " Good Heavens ! " or 
otherwise essentially inarticulate interjection; it is 
rarely purified into true exaltation. Other great writers 

62 



CAELYLE 

have felt as deeply, as intensely, but the very depth 
and intensity of their feeling has resulted in that con- 
dition of concentrated calm and serene possession in 
which the mind seems to work with an unaccustomed 
freedom from the embarrassments and obstacles of less 
sensitive moments. Carlyle is often turbulent, tumultu- 
ous, conscious of his perturbation, impatient of the ob- 
structions of coherent utterance, irritated at the necessity 
of effort in expression, exacerbated, violent, excessive. 
Despite his power therefore, which rarely fails to make 
itself felt, which is always to be either discerned or di- 
vined, he is, at times when his intensity of emotion 
should be both an inspiration and a constraint, its prey 
rather than its instrument. Thus his mood monopolizes 
his faculties and hampers quite as often as it stimulates 
his thought. His effort is absorbed in expressing it and 
not the ideas which have caused it. The shading of 
these, their efficacy, their attractiveness, their universal 
appeal, their relations and suggestions do not entrance 
him out of himself, but in proportion as they arouse 
his emotion sting him, as it were, into eloquent and 
apparently automatic exposition of their effect on him, 
into excited or contemptuous dithyramb and rhapsody. 
It is largely this strenuousness, I think, that gives his 
philosophy its special quality. And its quality conjoined 
with its character gives it a unique, even an isolated 
position. 



63 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

IV 

To be out of harmony with one's time and environ- 
ment is a heavy handicap on energy, which is thus in- 
evitably deflected instead of developed, however it may 
be intensified by isolation. It is inherently inimical to 
expansion, and Carlyle may really be said to have de- 
voted his prodigious powers to the endeavor to trans- 
form the " epoch of expansion " in which he passed his 
life into an " epoch of concentration " — to adopt Ar- 
nold's terminology. Unaided — or aided only by the 
futile of the intellectual world, the Froudes, the Kings- 
leys, the Kuskins — such an attempt must be both 
transitory and incomplete. " Epochs " are independent 
of individuals. It is their representative character that 
singularizes even the Titans of historic changes. 
Luther, for example, who attracted Carlyle immensely, 
disproportionately, incarnates the movement of concen- 
tration for which he stands, and did not produce it. 
The Eenaissance produced it. It crystallized out of the 
expiring expansion whose hour was over. The epoch 
of expansion which Carlyle contested with such elo- 
quence and energy was only beginning. So far as its 
movement of thought is concerned he never delayed its 
march an hour. He hardly even modified its evolution. 
He affected powerfully the varying feeling that accom- 
panied it, but the feeling he aroused, being general, was 
so largely either absent altogether from the direction of 
specific practice it took or else impotent to check it, 

64 



CARLYLE 

that this never sensibly stayed its steps. If utilitarian- 
ism has run its course it is in notable degree because its 
programme has been accomplished. If the world of 
thought was at all times insufficiently filled by it and ideal- 
ity flourished synchronously with ever-increasing vigor, 
this was not because of Carlyle's direct contributions 
to the latter, but because the ideality of his day took ad- 
vantage of his spiritual quickening in the development 
of its own spiritual philosophy, very different from his. 
Nor is the current reaction which Liberalism in the ex- 
asperation of its discomfiture would fain attribute to 
Carlyle's miscalled Gospel of Force, so attributable. The 
apologetics of the current gospel of force — in whose 
persistence, one may remark, too, in passing, nobody 
believes — are wholly at variance with the Eternal 
Verities and Immensities, the heroisms and scorn of 
hedonism which form the basis of his Berserker credo. 
In a word, no writer who has so stirred the moral 
or other emotions of his era has ever remained so for- 
eign to its thought or so out of harmony with its spirit 
as exhibited in its specific aspirations. Specifically the 
two supreme influences of the nineteenth century have 
been the scientific and the democratic spirit. And each 
found in Carlyle an instinctive and a deliberate an- 
tagonist. Science he neglected, democracy he decried ; 
both he enthusiastically and at times ridiculously de- 
spised — as indeed he did everything he did not like. 
Science, apparently, except the abstract science of 
mathematics, he knew nothing about. At thirty he 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

was, in Froude's view, the best-read man in England. 
For many years, at any rate, he had done little or 
nothing but read. His knowledge of history, of lan- 
guage, of literature was immense. It was, moreover — 
need it be said ? — assimilated knowledge. Compare 
even such elementary and cursory evidence as the 
extempore "Lectures on the History of Literature" 
with even Hallam. But with science there is no wit- 
ness of his having a speaking acquaintance. What he 
read of economics probably only served to whet his 
exasperation : from his point of view the abstraction of 
the so-called " economic man " was inherently trivial, 
and his impatience found the relief of relaxation in 
deriding, without examination, the "dismal" and 
" beaver " sciences based on an interest which not only 
he did not share but which, on the contrary, actively 
irritated him. Similarly with the natural sciences to 
which so much of the best intellect of the time has 
been consecrated, which have had such a prodigious 
influence in the amelioration of the lot of man and 
which have so markedly shifted the very foundations 
of mankind's speculations, beliefs, and activities — foun- 
dations upon which it is within the truth to say a new 
literature has arisen. But it is not his ignorance of 
science that so much distinguishes his position as o\it 
of focus with his day and generation. Other writers 
have been conspicuously ignorant of it, too, without 
losing their authority. Literature has often been very 
nobly independent of it, much even of the literature of 

66 



CARLYLE 

our own time. On the other hand attention to it has 
sometimes not particularly served the larger purpose 
of literature, as, for example, with George Eliot; or 
else has served it only to give it an unsatisfying and 
conventional currency, as with Tennyson, And Car- 
lyle's insight is so penetrating and clairvoyant that 
often it easily dispenses with its aid. This peasant 
Scotch Covenanter did not need to wait for the sanc- 
tions of the " Higher Criticism " in order to write his 
essay on Voltaire. His isolation and antagonism are 
mainly emphasized in this regard by his lack not of 
knowledge of nineteenth-century science, but of the 
scientific spirit itself which is so eminent a mark of his 
century. 

The scientific spirit signifies poise between hy- 
pothesis and verification, between statement and proof, 
between appearance and reality. It is inspired by the 
impulse of investigation tempered with distrust and 
edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty 
and sceptical of seeming. Mirage does not fascinate, 
nor blankness dispirit it. It is enthusiastically patient, 
nobly literal, candid, tolerant, hospitable. It has no 
major proposition to advocate or defend, no motive be- 
yond that of attestation. It shrinks from temerity in 
assertion at the same time that it is animated with the 
ardor of divination. It is, in a word, the antithesis of 
such a spirit as Carlyle's, which deduces with confi- 
dence from conceptions vividly apprehended but never 
Jimited in thought, intensely imagined but neither 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

scrupulously examined nor rigidly defined. The dis- 
tinction is not one of practice, between a 'priori and 
inductive mental processes. The scientific spirit has 
certainly as much need of one as of the other, but it 
dictates the testing of its initial syntheses and holds 
the revelations of its "immediate beholdings" to be 
guesswork until tried by the surer standards of the 
" logical understanding." It has its weak side, in- 
herently as well as in excess. Hamilton's assertion 
that a mathematician should be a poet implies an ideal 
not often, perhaps, attained. But in greater or less 
dilution it has supphed a tonic force in the speculation, 
the philosophy, and the art of the present day, a stim- 
ulus conspicuously lacking in the writings of Carlyle, 
which sag, in consequence, often into the vague and the 
questionable. 

:5 ;Even more than the scientific spirit, democracy has 
characterized the age of Carlyle, and it is its democracy 
chiefly that makes him ill at ease in it. He lived to 
see it run its course perhaps as an abstract ideal, but 
this was because practically the century had become 
interpenetrated with it. His own bitter denunciations 
of it in principle — of course he never denounced or 
advocated anything except in principle — had little or 
no weight. The reaction he preached was taken by 
his day for the " moonshine " which he termed its own 
convictions. That democracy has failed in the exalted 
mission with which the eighteenth century charged it, 
that as a panacea its inefficiency has become evident, 

68 



CARLYLE 

that it has developed unexpected weakness apparently 
inherent in its own scheme, that instead of radically 
revolutionizing society it has itself been modified in 
many ways in the course of its evolution, that it has 
proved a disappointment to such writers as Scherer 
and Lecky, does not obscure the fact that it is the 
working hypothesis of the world. Dithyramb in its 
praise is doubtless out of date, but it has not given 
place to dithyramb in its censure. To Carlyle, how- 
ever, it was equally abhorrent in theory and in prac- 
tice, idiotic in idea and in fact inexecutable. To him 
it essentially contravened the order of nature, the im- 
mutable law of the universe. He hated it instinctively. 
And from his aversion, one may suspect, he deduced 
his categorical principles of a spiritual cohesion of so- 
ciety, obliterating the independence of its units, the 
right of the wise and energetic to rule, the right of the 
foolish and weak to be ruled — his medisevalism, in a 
word. 

No one has made mediaevalism more attractive. 
" Past and Present " is a very notable book. The re- 
constitution of mediaeval life in the pictiire he makes 
out of the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakejond is vivid 
and telling — especially telling in contrast with certain 
sides of modern life with its " thirty thousand dis- 
tressed needlewomen in London alone " and its " cash 
payment the sole nexus between men." The book is, 
of course, inspired by the desire of exhibiting this con- 
trast — a desire which, of course, impairs its veracity. It 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

is in fact a pamphlet. Along with the spiritual unity 
and interdependence of mediaevalism — "Gurth was 
hired for life to Cedric and Cedric to Gurth" — went 
many qualifications of human felicity which Carlyle's 
partisanship neglects to note, and which are easily 
enough catalogued. But it is not so much his parti- 
sanship, his lack of the scientific spirit, as the anti- 
democratic feeling that dictates his feudahsm, and 
made his preachment of it fall on deaf ears. He liked 
feudalism because it meant the imposition of the 
strong upon the weak will, because during the day of 
its supremacy the people were least alive, because force 
was focussed in personalities, because the mediocre in 
all departments of activity was sacrificed to the salient, 
because mind — which he testily despised — had the 
least protection against purpose, because in every way 
it contrasted with the democratic differentiation of his 
antagonistic time. The only aspect of the French 
Eevolution that pleased him was not the rise of the 
democracy but the punishment of the noblesse. For 
its ideas he cared not a straw. He was even blind to 
them. The Eevolution, which Arnold calls " the great- 
est, the most animating event in history," was in his 
view merely a moral judgment for the rejection of the 
Eeformation two centuries before. He never felt the 
slightest interest, the least curiosity, in " the people," 
in any epoch. The democratic ideal, however theoretic 
it may have been, democratic philosophy, however 
rational and disillusioned it may have become, are in- 

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CARLYLE 

separable from humanitarianism and humanitarianism 
was itself antipathetic to Carlyle. Witness "Model 
Prisons" for a single example. Man as man meant 
nothing to him. The dignity of human nature he re- 
garded with truly Calvinistic derision. The " divine " 
element monopolized him. He even manufactured at 
need incarnations of it. Hence his doctrine of heroes, 
his view of history as the biography of great men, his 
exaltation of the exceptional personality. 

Here again his undemocratic feeling sets him aside 
from the current and movement of his time. History 
is now the history of peoples. Its heroes are resultants 
of popular forces, movements, phases. They are ex- 
plained, not " sent by God." Even literature conceives 
them in this way. There is a striking contrast not 
only in the treatment but in the titles of " Heroes and 
Hero Worship " and Emerson's " Eepresentative Men." 
Emerson was saturated with true democratic feeling. 
It was a constituent of his refinement. His heroes are, 
in the words he cites from SterKng : 

" Our nobler brothers, though one in blood." 

Carlyle's are exhibited in the strongest relief. The 
darker the time, the greater the hero. And his prefer- 
ence for the darkest time, the most legendary hero, is 
significant. The result is a kind of falsification of his- 
toric color, to say the least. Eeally his hero is often 
admirable only because his environment is not — Odin, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

for instance, and Mahomet. Yet by a curious confusion 
he glorifies the stern times that could produce the hero, 
merely because they have produced him. One feels 
that the train of thought is a little insipid. Hence an 
aggrandizement of the Norse twilight with its rude 
figures over the diffused day of Greece and its commu- 
nity of pleasanter personifications. Olympus is too 
democratic for him, there is too much freedom, too 
much individuality, as well as the lack of solemnity 
involved in less gloom. Even in mythology his instinc- 
tive preference for energy to light appears. In mythol- 
ogy, however, one may indulge his preferences. To 
treat the graver matters of history, and social and po- 
litical philosophy with mediaeval hostility to the vital 
force of the modern world and without its scientific 
spirit, is too antagonistic to the current of modern 
thought to be convincing to modern men, and too par- 
ticular to have, even abstractly, the cogency of utter- 
ance that is in harmony with the tone and rhythm of 
one's own time. 



Of course, in noting his tendency to make of his- 
tory a series of biographies, I do not mean to assert 
that in theory Carlyle altogether and implicitly denied 
the representative character of his heroes. Quite the 
contrary is the case, although explicitly he derides the 
disposition to call the hero the " creature of the Time " 
and exclaims : " The Time call forth ? Alas, we have 

72 



CARLYLE 

known Times call loudly enough for their great man ; but 
not find him when they called ! " But this representa- 
tive character of theirs he assumes and never so much 
as attempts to demonstrate. In strict a priori fashion 
he infers often that they not only represent but incar- 
nate the spirit of their time, which thenceforth he sees 
only as mirrored in their personalities. In practice 
therefore his concentration upon them becomes a study 
of idiosyncrasy instead of typical qualities. His in- 
stinct interests him in them in proportion to the 
strength of their individuality, and this is often the 
measure of their -imrepresentativeness. The same ple- 
beian antagonism to democratic feeling that leads him 
to consider the spirit of the time as negligible except as 
incarnated in the hero, leads him inevitably to magnify 
the hero in his purely personal and particular character. 
Thus, for example, his admiration of Johnson is based 
on his worshipping according to the old formulas in St. 
Clement Danes every Sunday in the age of Voltaire ; 
though for his attempt to rationalize the same old for- 
mulas he has nothing but ridicule for Coleridge. In 
every instance, we perceive, what really interests him 
is character, and character in itself, in proportion to its 
energy, intrinsically and not representatively at all. 
Thus, practically speaking, Carlyle's history is apt to be 
history just in so far as his heroes are truly representa- 
tive, and history, moreover, that is indirectly and not 
directly illuminating. In writing of such a character 
as Loyola, for example, his historical sense is merged 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

in the passion of the pamphleteer. Ignatius's person- 
ality attracted him as an artist, — attracted him viru- 
lently, one may say. But on the Catholic reaction, 
which is one of the most interesting and significant 
movements of history, and which is in a sense identical 
with Ignatius, it simply never occurs to him to throw 
any Hght whatever. 

This reserve made, however, his history is often 
wonderfully illuminating because of this very absorp- 
tion in character, which leads him to excessive and ex- 
clusive interest in the element of personality. This 
interest of itself implies a moral rather than a purely 
intellectual preoccupation, a superior concern for the 
heart and the soul, a quick feeling for the sentiment of 
a time, which when it is sympathetically, is therefore 
truly, interpreted. That is to say, divination discloses 
it as mere inspection cannot. And the sentiment of a 
time is, measurably speaking, the time itself. Accord- 
ingly, when Carlyle is in harmony with his epoch, his 
treatment of it, though never impartial and often exces- 
sive, is, through the very quality which in other cir- 
cumstances is a defect — his predominant interest in 
character, namely, and in the forces which constitute 
character, moral forces rather than ideas — vitally and 
centrally irradiating. No one has praised this inner 
method of Carlyle better than the external Taine. He 
calls it " a new fashion of writing history," and he goes 
on as follows : " Man is not an inert being, moulded by 
a constitution, nor a lifeless being expressed by a for- 

74 



CARLYLE 

mula ; he is an active and living soul, capable of acting, 
discovering, creating, devoting himself, and before all of 
daring: genuine history is an epic of heroism. This 
idea is, in my opinion, as it were a brilliant light. For 
men have not done great things without great emotions." 
Carlyle himself says the same thing in saying that 
Puritanism " came forth as a real business of the heart." 
For the exhibition of such when it was to him a sympa- 
thetic business he had an extraordinary aptitude. His 
exhibition of it then is extraordinarily vivid. " Grave 
constitutional histories hang heavy after this compilation," 
says Taine of the " Cromwell." It is also extraordina- 
rily luminous and searching. In the " Cromwell," Taine 
continues, " I can touch the truth itself." 

Everything, however, in this latter respect depends 
upon the sufficiency of the historian's sympathy. The 
French Eevolution, though far more a matter of the 
head than the Puritan, was also " a real business of the 
heart." Carlyle's panorama of it is, at least in sustained 
passages such as the " Taking of the Bastille," of epic 
vividness and even grandeur. Pictorially — rather, I 
think, than in a true literary sense — it is strictly in- 
comparable. But the truth of it! The truth is not 
simply altogether missed, as it might be by an historian 
of political or other formulary : it is deeply perverted. 
It is wholly misconceived by antagonism, by a hostility 
which is merely the complement of those Puritan pre- 
dilections that make his "Cromwell" so sympathetic 
an interpretation. "Carlyle judges the Eevolution," 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

says Taine again, " as unjustly as he judges Voltaire, 
and for the same reasons. He understands our man- 
ner of acting no better than our manner of thinking. 
. . . Generosity and enthusiasm abounded in France 
as well as in England ; acknowledge them under a 
form which is not English. These men were devoted 
to abstract truth, as the Puritan to divine truth ; they 
followed philosophy as the Puritan followed religion; 
they had for their aim universal salvation, as the Puri- 
tan had individual salvation. They fought against evil 
in society, as the Puritan fought it in the soul. They 
were generous as the Puritans were virtuous. They 
had, Kke them, a heroism, but sympathetic, sociable, 
ready to proselytize, which reformed Europe, while the 
English one only served England." 

There is no escaping from the justice of this judg- 
ment, and it is a terribly severe one. The words I 
have cited contain more candor in making distinctions 
where distinctions are of vital, of absolute, importance, 
than is to be found in all Carlyle's works. Plainly the 
inner method serves the historian ill — pillories him, 
indeed — if it is not applied by an imagination which 
can divine phenomena lying without the confines of its 
temperamental prejudices. It is not sufficient for him 
to place himself at the very centre of another's stand- 
point ; he must perform this feat when the other stand- 
point is a different, or even a hostile one — the faculty 
for which was denied to Carlyle as completely as if he 
had been devoid of all imagination whatever. The 

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CARLYLE 

" Fritziad " illustrates the fact less strikingly than the 
" French Kevolution," but it illustrates it amply. And 
in the essay on Voltaire it appears not incidentally and 
as the vitiating element of a work otherwise important, 
but as a direct and positive piece of sustained if un- 
conscious calumny. 

VI 

He was certainly an artist — to the point, indeed, 
which makes it possible to say that he is quite mis- 
conceived if the plastic element in his composition is 
not prominently considered. He cared nothing what- 
ever for art. It escaped him altogether. When he 
did not neglect, he insulted it. "May the devil fly 
away with the fine arts," he quotes sympathetically 
from some enlightened authority or other — perhaps, 
more suo, supposititious. It had for him the curious 
moral connotation it might have had for his Covenanter 
ancestry had they known of its existence. His rare 
admirations are childish — for example, the feeble 
Dante fresco portrait once ascribed to Giotto, his in- 
terpretation of which is as absurd as anything in Eus- 
kin, and, in another way, the puerile picture of " The 
Little Drummer," in which Frederick figures as a child. 
His praise of Dante's " song " is inferred from his ap- 
preciation of its burden, not due to a feeling for its 
wonderful integumental music. Froude says his ear 
was deficient and his metrical experiments a failure, 
which is true enough in general, though the translation 

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VICTORIAN PEOSE MASTERS 

of Goethe's noble verses in " Past and Present " is ade- 
quate and even moving. But any appeal purely to the 
aesthetic faculty he suspected, and whatever he sus- 
pected, of course, he either derided or denounced. It 
is singular that this does not qualify his worship of 
Goethe. 

His lack of sesthetic appreciation, however, neither 
obscures nor obstructs his striking powers of artistic 
expression. He made his own picture, to which every- 
thing he saw was contributory material, and he was so 
egoistic that the combinations of others did not interest 
him. And his picture is always sapiently, savamment, 
constructed. You may like the technic or not, but the 
effect — and the effect evidently preconceived, arranged, 
combined — is not to be denied. His praise of uncon- 
sciousness is, as I have already said, manifestly a reac- 
tion from the discomfort and often the misery with 
which his extremely conscious composition was at- 
tended. No writer ever thought more of how he was 
to do whatever he did. His journal records that he 
sat three days before the sheet of paper at the top of 
which the word " Voltaire " was written before writing 
a line of his famous essay. Certainly, during that 
time, he was not thinking what to say. And his efifect 
is always the supremely artistic effect of totality. In 
an elaborate work, as in an essay, the sense of the 
whole prevails with truly organic persistence in even 
the most individualized parts. His purpose is always 
an informing purpose, and his aim the single one at- 

78 



CAELYLE 

tained by a convergence of the most multifarious 
means. His art satisfies abundantly such definitions 
as : " The answer to the question, How ? " " The adapta- 
tion of means to ends," even " The interpenetration of 
the object with its ideal." 

A moment's reflection will assure any one of this. 
When we recall " Sartor," " Heroes," " Past and Pres- 
ent," " The French Eevolution," or the ten volumes of 
" Frederick," it is a single impression that we recall. 
This is true of even the " Latter-Day Pamphlets," which, 
in spite of their variety of subjects — " Stump Orator," 
" Jesuitism," " Model Prisons," etc. — leave the definite 
sensation of a prolonged and scarcely modulated shriek. 
Mr. Lowell complains of " The French Eevolution " 
that it is a series of " brilliant flashes," and that we get 
no " general view." The narrative is episodical, if one 
chooses, but the picture is composed from the centre, 
and its unity is conspicuous ; pictorially, the difficulty 
is that we get nothing hut a " general view." " Fred- 
erick" is a masterpiece of concentric and centripetal 
miscellany. The technic is here and there deplorable, 
there are waste places and bits over-elaborated, details 
summarily treated and others caressed out of all pro- 
portion. But when the immense size of the canvas and 
the heterogeneity of the subject are taken into consid- 
eration, the way in which the central figure is at once 
made to stand out in accentuated individuaUty and at 
the same time intimately connected with related figures 
and events remote or near at hand, the result seems a 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

marvel of artistic unity. It might surely have been 
better done. Herculean as the labor Carlyle undertook 
in it is, he undertook it, and in strictness should have 
performed it, instead of punctuating it with complaints 
of its onerousness and overloading it with unconformed 
data and disquisition. But it is a notable work of art. 
The " Cromwell " is on the other hand superbly 
done. It is in its kind unique. The way in which 
Cromwell is allowed to paint himself, issuing himself 
as it were for the first time from the lumber of effigies 
theretofore constructed of him, is unsurpassed in artis- 
tic vigor. It is compassed, too, by the subordination of 
stimulant commentary to the main business in hand — 
a circumstance that, however illuminating the method, 
must, in the case of so aggressive an advocate as Car- 
lyle, be taken as eloquent witness of his controlling 
genius for real effectiveness. Had he been content 
with a less striking impression, so strenuous a person- 
ality as his would not, in the whole plan and scope of 
his work, have so markedly yielded the centre of the 
stage. He certainly recouped himself somewhat in the 
entr'actes ; and the " Cromwell " is his single perform- 
ance of the kind. In general his art is disfigured by 
the converse of such aesthetic altruism, by caprice, the 
caprice of his temperament. But his deficiency as an 
artist is deeper than anything temperamental — deeper 
than excess, even, or the defiance of that discipline of 
genius which art has been called. It is his careless- 
ness of perfection, his insensitiveness to beauty, his in- 

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CARLYLE 

difiference to quality in his work. If he thought much 
how to do a thing, he thought little of how to do it well 
— well, that is to say, in correspondence with any 
classic standard or any ideal of power implying restraint. 
His devotion to expression was too absolute to be qual- 
ified by restraint, and nothing else, of course, will exor- 
cise excess, the essential foe of formal excellence. The 
inspiration of those passages in his works that are truly 
beautiful is moral not aesthetic feeling — the noble and 
affecting fragment on the death of Edward Irving, for 
example. The " Life of Sterling," which is a master- 
piece of contained expression, of sustained style and of 
admirable workmanship, which is his most finished 
production, and which may stand as a model biography 
in just those qualities that ordinarily his caprice is fatal 
to — the " Life of Sterling " is inspired by the desire to 
free his friend's memory from the misconceptions of 
Hare's account of him. Its lofty decorum and wise 
dignity seem dictated by the occasion, and show what 
he might have done had he conceived purely aesthetic 
ends thus deferentially. His " Address," too, on his 
election as Eector at Edinburgh is — especially for an 
essentially extempore address — marked by a rare 
sense of grace and harmony growing out of the senti- 
ment of the occasion, which appealed to him, always on 
the moral side, of course, very personally ; his apology 
for the furious fustian of the " Latter-Day Pamphlets " 
is particularly touching. But where he does not feel 
the pressure of moral constraint, his art is never dis- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

ciplined out of its excesses nor inspired to its felicities 
by the effort for perfection. The disproportion between 
expression and reserve is, accordingly, extreme. 



VII 

In expression, however, perhaps prose has not had 
a greater master. He could say anything he wanted to 
and with extraordinary energy. His style is a perfect 
mirror of his mind. No writer's is so idiosyncratic — 
so intensely idiosyncratic. It illustrates not only all 
his traits but all his moods. It brings out into the 
starkest rehef his defects as well as his qualities. It is 
terribly indiscreet and lays bare his caprice, his lack of 
deference, his defiance of discipline, his intoxicated irre- 
sponsibility. But it does more than this. It accentu- 
ates its substance, notably. It accelerates the momentum 
of his perversity and carries him along with it, through 
a cresceTido of Berserker surrender to the wild dehght 
of pure and utter expression, to a finale that is often 
outrageous and not infrequently inept. Never was 
there such an instance of the faculty of expression 
running away with its possessor. One perceives the 
explanation of his paradoxical praise of silence. After 
excess comes reaction. Self-consciousness is assailed 
by the sense of futility, and sincerity sacrifices its 
equilibrium in expiation. After a debauch of violence, 
which in the retrospect appears verbiage. La Trappe 
seems the only refuge. Then, of course — da capo; 

82 



CARLYLE 

endless renewal. Mr. Morley, I think, pleasantly 
characterizes Carlyle's works as " the gospel of silence 
in thirty volumes." But it is not this illogicality that 
is so conspicuous ; the gospel of silence, like any other 
gospel, must be uttered, even reiterated. The paradox 
really consists in its being preached with so much ver- 
bosity, such stentorian tone, such lucus a non lucendo 
cogency — at times such splutter. Self-consciousness, 
dissatisfied with its own facility, on the one hand, dis- 
satisfied, on the other, with the inherent disproportion 
between excess and cogency of expression, shows its 
exasperation in a disgust too drastic to be reasonable. 
" Be not a stump orator, thou brave young British man," 
admonishes Carlyle, " at least if thou canst help it." 
He knew how hard it was to help it. The addendum 
is illuminating. Perhaps it is humorous. But such 
humor is a trifle flat. 

Carlyle's humor is in general, I think, a trifle flat. 
It is an eminent trait of his style, but perhaps the least 
preservative one. It is almost altogether composed of 
that element of his style which is its most crying de- 
fect — excess, namely ; excess and caprice. Style im- 
plies consciousness, in large measure, and to ascribe 
humor to one's style instead of to one's instinctive 
manner of expression — as one must in the case of Car- 
lyle — is to characterize it as artificial. His humor is 
artificial ; it is more than wilful. And artificial humor 
depends upon novelty for its acceptability. Novelty, it 
is true, is an important consideration in many circum- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

stances. The joy in heaven over one sinner that re- 
penteth, closely examined, is doubtless partly due to it. 
But in the case of artificial humor novelty is a necessity. 
Such a specimen as the address to the Jesuit in 
" Latter-Day Pamphlets " : " Prim friend with the black 
serge gown, with the rosary, scapulary, and I know not 
what other spiritual block-and-tackle," etc., may, for ex- 
ample, have pleased on its appearance. But the novelty 
has worn off, and this kind of thing, in which Carlyle 
abounds, is itself " left naked to laughter," and laughter 
of a rather dreary sort, as he might say. The image with 
which the " Cromwell " closes may once have seemed a 
grim audacity, a kind of Eabelaisian figure of heroic out- 
rageousness, but what strikes one now in reading or 
recalling it is that it does not ring true. The same 
may be said of the welter of epithet and oddity with 
which his style is so often garnished. His allusions, 
comparisons, characterizations are frequently chosen 
out of a sense of humor, no doubt, but clung to, reiter- 
ated and played with out of deliberate perversity. 
They serve no end of illumination often, and only 
illustrate his disposition to free his mind without con- 
veying anything to the reader, who indeed needs a 
glossary for their comprehension. But they are volun- 
tary accidents of his style, and become mannerisms for 
which he displayed an increasing fondness. His 
underlying spontaneity, of which he had a stock pro- 
portioned to his enormous energy, often showed, ac- 
cordingly, a surface of pure affectation. 

84 



CAKLYLE 

His humor, thus, serves to betray the lack of genu- 
ineness in his style, and to bring out more clearly its 
lack of artistic sincerity. It bears all the marks of 
conscious elaboration. Original it undoubtedly is. It 
has no prototype even. But its originality is invented 
rather than native. Froude says quite truly that he 
had to make his own audience out of a public at first 
perplexed and repelled by it. It was deliberately as- 
sumed, as its post-dating the correctness of his earlier 
manner, the manner of the " Life of Schiller," shows. 
And not improbably it was assumed for effect, as the 
phrase is, designed, that is to say, to arrest attention 
rather than to win adhesion for the substance it 
clothed. He was for years casting about to " do some- 
thing " that should show his powers and give him his 
predestined place. The " something " proved to be his 
style. " Sartor " less fantastically habited would have 
appeared less singular ; it would have appeared, as it 
does now to readers long accustomed to its eccentrici- 
ties, not so very extraordinary after all. Its style was 
its Byronic collar, so to say. Oddity was in the air in 
those days. The outward and visible signs of tran- 
scendentalism were quite as striking as its inward sanc- 
tion. Carlyle eluded its superficialities and concen- 
trated his fantasticality upon something more vital. 
He had awaked many mornings without finding him- 
self famous. The long delay made it increasingly 
desirable that he should " burst upon the world " in 
some way. He did so in his style, which served the 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

purpose — his more or less conscious purpose — per- 
fectly. 

Artistically sincere it cannot, at any rate, be called, 
whatever its origin. It is too patently perverse. But 
it is extremely personal, and, as Carlyle developed it, 
it came to be an admirable instrument of pure expres- 
sion, its excesses and eccentricities matching the per- 
versities of his mind and giving him a freedom which, 
however disadvantageous in other respects, enabled him 
to say effectively whatever he wished to say. They 
grew together, perhaps with mutual concessions, until 
he reached the ability to pour it forth extempore with 
an ease of effluence rivalling the song of a bird, the 
natural gush of a fountain, and yet always with such 
idiosyncrasy as sometimes to borrow from it character 
for very commonplace substance. 'No writer has ever 
achieved such distinction in singularizing ineptitude by 
the piquancy of his style. It came to vary directly 
with the varying temper that vibrated around the 
course of his most constant thinking. It is the vivid 
and elastic medium of his gravity, his irony, his deep 
earnestness, his triviality, his vehemence, his sportive- 
ness, because it follows closely his every impulse and 
never checks nor constricts his utterance by the sug- 
gestion of conformity to any consistency of its own. 

It certainly had consistency. So marked a style 
must indeed run into mannerism and monotony. But 
its consistency is the mere reflection of Carlyle's emo- 
tional state. When he glows it is vivid, when he nods 

86 



CARLYLE 

it is dull with an ashen dulness. The moment his 
energy flags it becomes mechanical ; its elasticity 
" sets " ; its artificial side becomes evident. But cer- 
tainly at its best, that is to say at his best, it is superb 
in the transparency with which it discloses the ener- 
getic working of a powerful mind under the stress of 
strong emotion. It interposes no veil between the 
writer and his readers. It is wonderfully direct and 
wonderfully plastic. It is vital rather than crystalline 
because its inspiration is feeling. But it is notably 
clear. Incrusted with the various extraneities of ob- 
scure and recondite allusion dictated by personal 
caprice and a contemptuous indifference to the compre- 
hension of the reader, the thread of it is always 
brilliantly plain — like a streak of scarlet through a 
tangle of green. It is never turgid even in its vio- 
lences, nor involved even in its fantasticalities. |Its 
vocabulary is enormous, but never encumbers it. It 
eschews pedantry with instinctive felicity. Its epi- 
thets are complete characterizations. Its very uneven- 
ness heightens its color. No conceivable style could 
better fit the picturesque, and in the external world it 
is the picturesque that absorbs Carlyle, as the moral 
does in the spiritual. The world, considered purely as 
a spectacle, impressed him as a chaos of confused con- 
trasts and, aside from its moral meaning or futility, it 
stimulated his acute sense for the fortuitous, which is 
the essence of the picturesque. Its ordered beauty did 
not greatly move him. His feeling for the truly dra- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

matic is accordingly a little superficial, I think, though 
when he feels it on its moral side, he treats it with a 
splendid eloquence, as in the conclusion of the lecture 
on Mahomet with its " within one century afterwards, 
Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that ; 
glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius. 
Arabia shines through long ages over a great section 
of the world." One could cite such instances by the 
score, instances of eloquence untouched by rhetoric, 
untainted by the common, thought and expression 
fused at white heat and glowing with a purity of 
radiance that is the very mystery of genius and its 
power to transfigure the temperamental plebeian and 
the hereditary peasant into the poet, the prophet, and 
the patrician. 

VIII 

" The moral life of man," says Froude, in one of 
those sentences that tend to make literature of his 
writings, " is like the flight of a bird in the air. He is 
sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to exert 
himself he falls." Carlyle's supreme service to his 
generation is to have stimulated and strengthened its 
sustaining moral energy. Except his notable rehabili- 
tation of the Puritans and Cromwell — a very notable 
exception, it is true, yet after all not only strictly cog- 
nate to his work as a moralist, but strictly also in a 
sense an academic excursus of it — little else, I think, 
can be claimed for him. Of the histories, his " French 

88 



CAKLYLE 

Eevolution" is a caricature and a libel, and all the 
pictorial splendor of its poetic prose cannot obscure its 
fundamental misconceptions. His " Frederick " is a 
piece of Titanic special pleading. Freeman remarked 
of " The Decline and Fall," that whatever else was read, 
" Gibbon must be read, too." Conversely, one may say 
of the "Frederick," that whether it is read or not, 
something else must also be read, and Mr. Tuttle need 
not have apologized for his painstaking "History of 
Prussia." 

On his own theory that, " to know a thing, what we 
can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, 
sympathize with it," Carlyle should have let the eigh- 
teenth century — "ce si^cle sans dme" — alone. Man, 
not God, was its preoccupation, in contradistinction 
from its predecessor. Its " souUessness " revolted him. 
Its humanitarianism meant nothing to him. Its great 
discovery of the dignity of man, he flouted. In its 
substitution of the heart for the soul, its rational- 
ization of the affections, ^ts ideals of freedom of spirit 
and faculty, of equality of rights and duties, of frater- 
nity of interests and feehngs to the end of mutual 
advantage and co-operative advance, he saw only a 
chaotic scramble after the ignis fatuus of happiness, 
selfishly inspired. In the seventeenth century he is 
at home, and accordingly his " Cromwell " is his great- 
est work, his true masterpiece. But even the " Crom- 
well" is as history impaired by the heavy defects of 
its qualities. As its eulogist, Taine, himself, observes : 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

" Caiiyle is so much their [the Puritans'] brother that 
he excuses or admires their excesses — the execution of 
the King, the mutilation of Parliament, their intoler- 
ance, inquisition, the despotism of Cromwell, the the- 
ocracy of Knox." Different temperaments will always 
view them differently, but historically the last word 
has probably been said about the Puritans. And 
though he prepared the way for it, it is certain that 
Carlyle did not say it. 

There remain in the way of formal service to his 
time his slight and suggestive rather than systematic 
advocacy of emigration and education as remedies for 
English ills and his introduction to the English reading 
public of German literature — of which his treatment, 
however, was notably uncritical. It is outside there- 
fore of his partisan history, his not novel philosophy, 
his imperfect criticism, formally considered, that the 
true distinction of Carlyle's writings is to be found. 
It is to be found in their moral cogency — the moral 
cogency with which, indeed, his history, philosophy, 
and criticism are impregnated, and which, rather than 
their historical, philosophic, or critical merits, consti- 
tutes their vital value. A critic of the absence of the 
practical in his gospel calls him merely " a moral brass 
band," and contrasts him painfully with philosophers 
of the concrete usefulness of Bentham and Mill. The 
figure is hardly just. Morally considered, he had not 
the rudimentary organization it implies ; he was rather 
a double orchestra. But the meaning is sound. Why, 

90 



CARLYLE 

however, moral stimulus should be belittled; why, 
above all, it should be deemed, of all things in the 
world, impractical, is difficult to see. " They were not 
madmen, but men of business," says Taine, of the Puri- 
tans. "The whole difference between them and the 
men we know is that they had a conscience." It is not 
the whole difference, but it is in the highest degree a 
practical one. The view that conceives character 
rather than institutions as the great force in human 
affairs, individual as well as social, is as practical as 
the converse view; it is indeed the view which has 
mainly determined the crises of English progress, the 
view from which its vaunted "practical results" have 
proceeded. To celebrate this view, to enforce it on 
every occasion, to converge upon its significance the 
sum of human experiences and the reflections they 
arouse, to illustrate it with a wealth of example, to 
extract its essential dignity and nobility from the 
crudities with which it is often encumbered, to exhibit 
it as the one necessary and permanently fruitful con- 
sideration for bringing human activity into accord with 
the harmony that is not human but divine, to exalt it 
with eloquence and preach it with the ardor of fire, all 
with a view to the induction in the reader of a distinct 
spiritual attitude governing his every thought and act, 
must seem to any one but a pedant, in strictest compu- 
tation, the most practical thing in the world. To 
assert the contrary is equivalent to calling the Levit- 
ical code, for example, more practical than the Sermon 

91 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

on the Mount. Discussion of the practicality of Car- 
lyle's preaching is, in fact, pure verbiage. What is 
really meant by the denial of it is that in a time of 
measures he occupied himself with men. 

His real limitation — and it is, I think, a tragic one 
— is not the miscalled unpractical nature of his writ- 
ings, the nature they share with those of perhaps the 
majority of the writers who have influenced the 
thought and feeling of the world, but the defective 
nature of his spiritual ideal. His conception of char- 
acter is of rectitude plus energy, and it is an imperfect 
conception. Character is, it is true, the basis of every- 
thing persistent and effective in the effort of mankind 
and what saves it from futility and chaos. But char- 
acter that is most efficient and most benign is charac- 
ter rounded and complete, its energy tempered with 
sweetness, its derivative conduct illumined with light, 
and its various powers expanded in every fruitful 
direction instead of driven in upon themselves in con- 
centration and constraint. " Were we of open sense as 
the Greeks were," he says finely of the sailing of the 
Mayflower, "we had found a Poem here." Precisely. 
Of all our writers he most lacks this " open sense," and 
his lack of it narrows his spiritual horizon. Beauty 
lies beyond its bounds — even the beauty of holiness. 
In his hierarchy of heroes there are no saints. He is 
temperamentally of the old dispensation. The expan- 
sion of the new, under its vitalizing principle of the 
love which casteth out fear, is quite foreign to him. 

92 



CARLYLE 

His references to the Crucified are perfunctory and 
mechanical — one would say obligatory rather than 
spontaneous. He never melts in joyous unison with 
the fair smile upon the face of Duty, or inhales with 
the dilutest rapture the fragrance that treads in her 
footing. His almost unremittent tension does not 
relax into kindness. His exacting demands are not 
tempered with tolerance. " On the whole we are not 
altogether here to tolerate ! We are here to resist, to 
control and vanquish withal," he says. One perceives 
the spirit that animates him. Beside such evidence of 
it, his occasional eulogy of the " Eeligion of Sorrow," 
even, seems a concession to the conventional. 

Of the four powers into which Matthew Arnold 
conveniently divided humanizing agencies : the power of 
intellect and science, the power of beauty, the power of 
social life and manners and the power of conduct," the 
last only interests him or plays any part in his gospel, 
which is therefore wholly addressed to the individual. 
The only concert I can recall of which he speaks well 
is Knox's theocracy, which also appeals to him as the 
ideal of a millennium in which all the individual units 
are righteously disposed. What we know as social 
forces were to him quite negligible. He admired 
amenity as little as he possessed it. He praises the 
" broad simplicity, rusticity " of the " Norse System " 
as " so very different from the light gracefulness of the 
old Greek paganism," and argues its sincerity from its 
rudeness. "Sincerity, I think, is better than grace," 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

he naively adds. And indeed naive is the one word to 
apply to some aspects of Carlyle's point of view. He 
knew the world profoundly, but he viewed it from 
Ecclefechan. Moreover, he saw his own principles 
through the prism of his temperament. And no writer 
ever had so much temperament. It injures his ideal 
for us and makes it less attractive. But what is far 
more grave is that, in doing so, it weakens the stimulus 
he would otherwise afford to readers who would other- 
wise be drawn to those of its elements that are at once 
noble and indispensable. He imposes it instead of 
making it lovely. To earnest souls — and he can have 
no other readers — the way seems hard enough. Car- 
lyle often recalls the anecdote related by Mr. Frederic 
Harrison apropos of Fitzjames Stephen, perhaps Car- 
lyle's most distinguished disciple, in which a stern 
confessor tells a dying penitent, endeavoring to turn 
his thoughts toward heaven, that he " ought to be 
thankful he had a hell to go to." " To-day thou shalt 
be with me in Paradise " is not only more winning and 
therefore of a higher potency, but it illustrates a later 
stage of ethical evolution. 

Nevertheless Froude's striking figure, which I have 
already cited, is justified of every man's experience. 
Every man, the most innocent as well as the most vir- 
tuous, knows the incessant pressure of the necessity of 
moral effort. " There is none that doeth good, no, not 
one." The opportunity of doing good or of avoiding 
doing it is exquisitely adjusted in scale to the degrees 

94 



CARLYLE 

with which perfection is approached. Every one is con- 
scious of life as a succession of choices which it be- 
hooves him to make rightly on pain either of, at the 
least, a sense of dissatisfaction or of feeling that he is 
ceasing to count at all and declining into the estate of 
" the beasts that perish." Of himself he can do nothing. 
Effort and high resolve — whether labelled " the grace 
of God " or " the higher self " is immaterial — are 
needed to dominate the " law of the members," which 
operates instinctively along the line of least resistance 
and tends toward the greater inclination, and the result 
of which, in the modern world at least, is dissatisfaction 
and distress. In the antique world we are apt to think 
it may not have been so. Heine, for example, con- 
ceived that it was not so, and the tragic result of this 
belief in his own case does not refute the many true 
and searching things he said in support of it. " The 
ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry," 
says Matthew Arnold, writing of Theocritus. Of the 
real pagan life, however, one may find the witness of 
the ideal idyllist less illuminating than the graver lit- 
erature from ^schylus to Juvenal. And whatever it 
was, it is over. Evolution alone has fixed our status 
The purely sensuous ideal, if it ever practically existed, 
is irrevocably submerged. The tyranny of conscience 
has perhaps also passed its apogee. When Mr. James, 
for example, concludes his life of Hawthorne with the 
words " Man's conscience was his theme, but he saw it 
in the light of a creative fancy which added out of its 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

own substance an interest and I may almost say an im- 
portance," the modern reader is quite in agreement 
with him. But conscience long since won -its perma- 
nent place in the domain of the common consciousness 
of mankind. It has not been exorcised in its rationali- 
zation. And the status it imposes is recognized by 
consciousness as the prize of constant effort. What 
greater service than the stimulation of this effort is it 
open to literature to render to humanity ? one feels like 
asking in the presence of Carlyle's massive contribution 
to what he himself loftily defines as " the Thought of 
Thinking Souls." Only one, perhaps ; that of lighten- 
ing it as well. 



96 



GEORGE ELIOT 



/ 



GEOEGE ELIOT 



How long is it since George Eliot's name has been 
the subject of even a literary allusion ? What has 
become of a vogue that only yesterday, it seems, was 
so great ? Of course, every day has its own fiction- — 
even ours, such as it is. But this does not exclude 
popular interest in august survival — Thp,ckeray, Dick- 
ens, Jane Austen, Eeade, TroUope, Charlotte Bronte, 
every one but Bulwer and George Eliot, I should say. 
As to Bulwer, perhaps, speculation would be surplus- 
age. The neglect, however, into which so little neg- 
ligible a writer as George Eliot has indubitably fallen 
is one of the most curious of current literary phenom- 
ena, and an interesting one to consider, since consider- 
ing it involves also a consideration at the same time 
of the remarkable genius that is the subject of it. It 
is probably largely due to the fact that from a purely 
intellectual point of view people, in books or out of 
them, are both less interesting and less idiosyncratic 
than we were wont to suppose when George Eliot's 
fame was at its height. 

The novelty of psychological fiction was a powerful 

L.ofC. 99 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

source of attraction, in the first place. For any such 
fiction as hers, which keeps one actively thinking not 
only some but all of the time, the stimulus of novelty 
is requisite, because only under such stimulus does the 
mind experience the zest that alone sustains the 
needed alertness of appreciation. In the second place, 
its ex m termini superiority — surely no stuff of fiction 
could have the dignity and the significance of the hu- 
man mind ! — gave it an irrefutable claim on our 
esteem. The novelty has disappeared. We have had 
a surfeit of psychological fiction since George Eliot's 
day. Psychology, too, has entered as an element into 
almost every other variety of fiction. And the gla- 
mour of novelty gone, we have been able to discern 
the defects, once obscured by the qualities, of the 
purely intellectual element of fiction when it wholly 
overshadows aU others. We now recognize that 
science had invaded the domain of literature — dona 
ferens and undistrusted. The current reaction, started 
perhaps, exemplified certainly, by Stevenson — the 
significance of whose work is purely "literary" — is so 
great as to have sacrificed seriousness along with 
science. But it is not necessary to exalt the puerile 
in order to establish the insufficiency of the pedantic. 
And to pedantry, however obscurely felt or uncon- 
sciously manifested, disproportionate preoccupation 
with the intellectual element in fiction is apt, popu- 
larly, to be ascribed. 



100 



GEOKGE ELIOT 



II 



"^ George Eliot certainly stands at the head of 
psychological novelists, and though within far nar- 
rower limits she has here and there been equalled — 
by Mr. Hardy, for example ; and in highly differenti- 
ated types, in the subtleties and miances of the genre 
by Mr. Henry James — it is probable that the genre 
itself will decay before any of its practitioners will, 
either in depth or range, surpass its master spirit. As 
George Eliot herself remarks, " Of all forms of mistake, 
prophecy is the most gratuitous " ; but we may conjec- 
ture that the psychological novel, in its present ex- 
plicit sense, will disappear before her own pre-emi- 
nence in the writing of it is successfully challenged. 
She is, thus, and is likely to remain, a unique figure. 
More than any other writer's her characters have — and 
for the serious readers of the future will continue to 
have — the specifically intellectual interest. This in- 
terest, indeed, is so marked in them that one is 
tempted to call it the only one they possess. What 
goes on in their minds is almost the sole concern of 
their creator/ Our attention is so concentrated on 
what they think that we hardly know how they feel, 
or whether — in many cases, at least, where we never- 
theless have a complete inventory of their mental fur- 
niture — they feel at all. They are themselves also 
prodigiously interested in their mental processes. 
They do a tremendous lot of thinking. In any emer- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

gency or crisis their minds fairly buzz, like a wound 
clock with the pendulum removed. We assist at the 
spectacle of a cogitation that seems to be pursued by 
the thinkers themselves with disinterested devotion. 
V At all events, the stars of the company not only prac- 
tise but enjoy mental exercise to an extent not else- 
where to be met with. 

I have heard it remarked in qualification of the 
legitimate interest of Thackeray's characters, that they 
" never seem to have any fun with their minds," and 
it is certainly true that in the concert of powers of 
which the nature of Thackeray's personages is com- 
posed, the mind does not hold a notable hegemony. The 
personages themselves are rarely either introspective or 
mentally energetic for pure love of the exercise. But 
the drama itself of George Eliot's world is largely an 
intellectual affair The soul, the temperament, the heart 
— in the scriptural sense — the whole nature, plays a 
subordinate part. The plot turns on what the charac- 
ters think. The characters are individualized by their 
mental complexions ; their evolution is a mental one ; 
they change, develop, deteriorate, in consequence of see- 
ing things differently. Their troubles are largely mental 
perplexities ; in her agony of soul Romola goes to Savon- 
arola and Gwendolen to Deronda for light, not heat. 
The prescriptions they receive are also terribly ex- 
plicit — addressed quite exclusively to the reason, and 
wholly unhke that obtained by Nicodemus " by night." 
The courtship of Esther and Felix Holt is mainly an 

102 



GEOEGE ELIOT 

interchange of " views." There are exceptions — nota- 
bly Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea, the two characters 
which have been called — with ample reason, one may 
guess — autobiographic. But the exceptions accentuate 
the rule. As a rule the atmosphere of each novel is 
saturated with thought. Certainly nowhere else in 
fiction is there any such apotheosis of intellect, both 
express and implied. 

Yet it is the temperament, not the thinking, of 
men and women that is permanently and rewardingly 
interesting in that field of literature which fiction con- 
stitutes. Sociology rather than psychology is its aux- 
iliary science — because, no doubt, sociology is hardly 
to be called a science at all. Thought is a universal 
and automatic process compared with feeling, than 
which it is far less idiosyncratic and particular. It is 
comparatively impersonal. It does not distinguish in- 
dividuals with any very salient sharpness. Other 
things being equal — which, perhaps, they rarely are, 
but that is nothing — people think very much alike. 
It has been remarked of the insufficiency of argument 
that a legislative vote was never changed by a speech. 
The mind is far less recondite than is generally im- 
agined, except in so far as it is complicated by feeling. 
Turgenieff legitimately complains of Zola that he tells 
us how Gervaise Coupeau feels, but never what she 
thinks. But the converse exclusiveness is a greater 
defect. Surely the characters of Turgenieff himself 
that remain in our memory are those whose feehngs 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

he has described rather than those whose minds he 
has exhibited to us. Who knows what Gemma, or the 
Kussian Dido in " Spring Floods," thinks ? Or, rather, 
we know what they must think without being told — 
their thinking being clearly a mere corollary of their 
feeling, which is admirably set forth. Why is Maggie 
TuUiver such a definite entity to us, beside Felix Holt, 
for example ? Because she feels more and is shown to 
us from this point of view. Felix, even, would have 
had very much the same and no more interest for us 
if his creator had furnished him with an entirely dif- 
ferent stock of the notions in which he is so rich. Why 
is Tom Tulliver not so interesting a character, but, be- 
ing profoundly uninteresting rather from any but a 
curious standpoint, so characteristic a masterpiece of 
George Eliot's genius ? Because he is differentiated 
mentally, almost exclusively, with the result of nearly 
complete colorlessness — so wholly is color in character 
a matter of temperament — and because George Eliot's 
intellectual preoccupation is here, therefore, an advan- 
tage and not a limitation in the work of characteriza- 
tion. She has not made Tom interesting, but she has 
made his lack of interest real, and so vividly real as to 
be profoundly suggestive, and therefore the point of de- 
parture for interesting speculation in the reflective mind. 
Where the lack of temperament is not, however, 
the point of the character to be illustrated, her prac- 
tice is less productive. Her major premise, that all 
people are mentally interesting, is seen to be at fault 

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GEOEGE ELIOT 



when she deals with personages the discrimination 
of whose intellectual peculiarities certainly needs to 
be supplemented by a consideration of that side of 
them which says, "I myself am heaven and hell." 
The soul is always interesting — in its traits, its poten- 
tialities, its mystery — whatever its incarnation. It is 
permitted us to believe — but even if theretofore the 
statement had been a supercilious supposition, George 
Eliot would have demonstrated its soundness — that 
there are numbers of our fellow-creatures whose minds 
hardly repay study. How many pages of "Middle- 
march" — that encyclopaedic panorama of the provincial 
human mind — are there devoted to the meeting of 
hospital trustees to elect a chaplain ? Who remembers 
the outcome, even if, indeed, he remembers that the 
contest was between a Church clergyman and a dissent- 
ing minister ? But who, that remembers the incident 
at all, does not recall how completely the mental 
equipment and processes of each of the mainly insig- 
nificant members of the board are exposed and docu- 
mented ? And with what result ? Chiefly, I think, 
that of leading one to inquire, "Why ?" 



Ill 

One consequence of this intellectual preoccupation 
and point of view is incontestable : whatever one's pre- 
dilections, one cannot gainsay that it is fatal to action. 
In George Eliot's world nothing ever happens, one is 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

tempted to say ; certainly less, very much less, than in 
the world of any other writer of fiction of the first rank. 
Sometimes nature intervenes, as in the flood of " The 
Mill on the Floss." Sometimes there is a catastrophe '' 
of a human but impersonal order, as in " Eomola." 
Nothing dramatic is evolved out of the action that is a 
resultant of the forces of character, for of these forces 
the intellectual only and not the passional have been 
elaborately dealt with. The infanticide in " Adam 
Bede " is a barely concrete excuse for the structure of 
moral analysis erected upon it. The intensest incident ^ 
inspired by love — before George Eliot certainly a not 
neglected element of fiction — is the kissing of Maggie's 
arm by Stephen Guest; though the tragedy of this 
book is too splendid to suffer from any limitation. Mr. 
Frederic Myers notes that the only love-letter in all the 
novels was written by Mr. Casaubon. There are whole 
chapters of mental analysis leading up to Dorothea's 
marriage, but the marriage itself takes place off the 
stage and is chronicled in a line. Nothing is more 
characteristic than the way in which the catastrophe of 
" Daniel Deronda " is treated. George Eliot leaves the 
telling of it entirely to Gwendolen. Any one interested 
in the fate of Grandcourt (perhaps he is not quite " con- 
vincing " enough to be popular) would resent the abrupt- 
ness of his drowning, his sudden disappearance from the 
face of the earth, his demise only to be described later 
as material for casuistry. 

It is undoubtedly partly true that George Eliot 
106 



GEORGE ELIOT 

shrank instinctively from the melodramatic. " At this 
stage of the world if a man wants to be taken seriously 
he must keep clear of melodrama," she makes Deronda 
observe. She certainly wanted to be taken seriously, 
and she certainly has been ; even solemnly. But her 
instinctive feeling in this respect was greatly reinforced 
by her practice of limiting the field of her fiction as she 
did. The drama with which she was concerned was 
the interior drama, the successive mental changes 
whereby a person gradually attains his or her develop- 
ment ; and to this anything like elaborateness or com- 
plication of plot, any narrative of events or record of 
incidents which play so important a part in fiction, even 
when they are merely the background that sets off the 
characters concerned in them, seems inapposite. Her 
themes are in general so high and her treatment so 
serious, the moral so inevitable, so like the moral of life 
itself — the life and reality of which any book of hers 
is the equivalent in literature — that even tragedy, 
where she employs it, seems a little artificial, a 
httle contrived and arranged, a concession perhaps to 
precedent, an expedient at best, less typical at all events 
than the moral it enforces and decidedly inferior to it 
in reality, in convincing illusion. Indeed, where her 
practice did not exclude it altogether, her tragedy itself 
comes very near the confines of melodrama, from which 
her instinctive repugnance does not save her, and which 
she would probably have handled better but for her 
predetermined consecration to the undramatic and phil- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

osophical. One need mention in illustration only " The 
Spanish Gypsy," in which melodrama abounds — though 
melodrama, it is true, of the mildest-mannered kind 
that ever flourished on the banks of the Guadalquivir 
or arrayed itself in Andalusian vesture. But there is a 
tincture of melodrama even in such a tragedy as the 
end of " Eomola." Imagine even Zola, who is none too 
scrupulous in such a situation but who " understands 
himself " admirably in it, resorting to the " poetic jus-' 
tice " of Baldasarre's final reunion with Tito in the death- 
grapple in the Arno. The whole Baldasarre part of the 
book, indeed, is melodrama, and the least successful of 
the motives of the story. The Hawthornesque incident 
of the secret panel in " Daniel Deronda," which when 
moved disclosed the dead face adumbrating the tragedy 
of Grandcourt's death, is melodrama, albeit of an awk- 
wardness that shows a flagging fancy and a tired hand. 
In short it cannot be said that George Eliot's true 
theme — the constitution and development of the human 
mind and its effect on the conduct and character of the 
soul, its subject — either receives, or especially needs 
perhaps, the aid of action, of the dramatic element, 
upon which nevertheless a very considerable part of 
the general interest in fiction depends. 

IV 

An analogous but more important trait is the lack 
of creative imagination that is implied, as the lack of 

108 



GEOEGE ELIOT 

action is involved, in the scientific turn of her genius. 
Whatever dramatic demands upon a novelist's characters 
one may forego, the vivid and enduring interest of the 
characters themselves requires an imaginative differen- 
tiation. Otherwise they lose in concrete effect very 
much in proportion to their abstract interest, which in 
George Eliot's characters is very great. And it is the 
concrete effect that, in any work of art, is of funda- 
mental value. George Eliot's world is certainly less 
concrete than its moral inspiration, which is often as 
definite as a proposition. Her characters are thus, it is 
true, perfectly typical — in spite of the extent to which 
they are psychologically individualized. And this con- 
stitutes for them a family distinction of importance. 
The characters of no other novelist are discriminated so 
nicely at the same time that they have also a clear rep- 
resentative value. They occupy a middle ground in 
this respect, one may say, between the personages of 
Thackeray, who is accused latterly of having no psy- 
chology, and those of Hawthorne, which, as Mr. James 
points out, are never types. This is, perhaps, why they! 
are so rarely our companions, our intimates, as the j 
characters of even inferior novelists are, though I im- 
agine the reason is mainly that they are mentally in- 
stead of temperamentally individualized, and that it is 
the sense, the volitions and the emotions rather than 
the intellect of people which, in fiction as in life, attach 
them to us and give them other than a quasi-scientific 
interest for us. And, besides, George Eliot's star char- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

acters, if types, are apt to be rare types, and, from that 
fact also, depend largely on their speculative interest. 
" Yet surely," as she says herself (in " Janet's Kepent- 
ance "), " the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is 
that which enables us to feel with him, which gives us 
a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under 
the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion." We do 
not, I think, sufficiently feel with George Eliot's per- 
sonages. They have too much a speculative, and too 
little an imaginative, origin and suggestion. 

It is for this reason, perhaps, more than any other, 
that one can hardly claim for her the quaHty of the 
" born novelist," in the integral, exclusive, and felicitous 
sense in which Thackeray was one. Nevertheless, it is 
as certainly true that in the creation of character her 
remarkable gifts were at their best. She thought about 
other things, to be sure, when this was the matter in 
hand, and did this less weU in consequence. Moreover, 
she did other things, and did them from their own 
point of view. But she did these less well still than 
the worst of her character-construction. Whereas, for 
example, the fact that she wrote " The Spanish Gypsy " 
at all attests the incompleteness of her native call as a 
novelist, its marked inferiority to her novels, in spite 
of its sincerity, its ambitiousness and its notable excel- 
lences, gives a certain relief to the genuineness of her 
true vocation. It is not perhaps to say very much to 
say that her characters are her own, and in a more in- 
timate sense than that of their family likeness to which 

110 



GEOKGE ELIOT 

I have alluded. No one else could have created them. 
They have no fellows outside her world. Any one else 
would have portrayed the same types, even, very differ- 
ently. But this is so eminently true — so much truer 
than it is of some novelists of very high rank, of the 
romancers in general, very often, surely — that in itself 
it witnesses the harmony with which her genius ex- 
pressed itself in fiction, and shows why she wrote novels 
better than she wrote anything else. Add to this the par- 
ticular quahty of her genius and its eminence, and the 
high rank of her fiction is deduced as the third term 
of a syllogism. It is indeed a body of work that not 
only is of the first order but that stands quite by itself. 
It was doubtless in thinking mainly of George 
Eliot, whose aptest pupil he was, that more than a 
score of years ago Mr. Hardy spoke of fiction as having 
" taken a turn, for better or worse, for analyzing rather 
than depicting character and emotion." It was cer- 
tainly George Eliot who more than any other practi- 
tioner gave fiction this turn — a turn still followed, 
with whatever modifications, and illustrated in all seri- 
ous examples of the art, so much so that a novel with- 
out the psychological element is almost as much of a 
solecism as a picture with a conventional chiaroscuro. 
Analyzing, synthetizing — the terms do not matter 
much ; in any mental exercise of importance, both pro- 
cesses are involved. Nothing could be more systemati- 
cally synthetic than the patient way in which, having 
arrived, deductively, no doubt, from the suggestions of 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

observation, at the idea of a character, and then ana- 
lytically induced the traits which belong to it, George 
Eliot puts these together in orderly demonstration of 
the vaKdity of her original theorem. This, to be sure, 
relates to the mental process of the artist rather than 
to the technic, which is certainly analytic enough in 
the case of George Eliot. But it is worth while, per- 
haps, in accepting Mr. Hardy's expression as practically 
adequate enough to indicate to us the turn in fiction 
that he had in mind, nevertheless to remember that 
with George Eliot, at least, analysis has no tyrannical 
preponderance over other faculties of the mind, and 
that, so far from being allowed in unchecked monopoly 
to unravel its material into uninteresting and unrelated 
shreds, it merely co-operates with these to a truly crea- 
tive end. A character of George Eliot is never picked 
to pieces, in a word. It is perfectly coherent and 
original — as original and coherent as a character of 
Dickens, for example, which is not analyzed at all. 

It is, however, not the product of the imagination. 
Its conception — let us say, rather, its invention — is 
less irresponsible and spontaneous than if it were ; itself, 
therefore, has, on the whole, less vitality — less reality, 
which is the vitality of a character of fiction. It is the 
result of the travail of the mind, the incarnation of an 
idea, not the image of a vision. Such a character as 
Gwendolen in " Daniel Deronda " is as truly a creative 
as if she were not also a critical product, but it is clear 
that, inductively conceived, she is deductively deline- 

112 



GEORGE ELIOT 

ated ; one cannot avoid seeing the machinery, so to say, of 
the author's mind throughout the process, and applying 
to it the terms of logic rather than of hterature. She 
is an essay, with illustrations, on the egoistic girl to 
whom her own personaHty is of immense, of absorbing 
importance, who counts wantonly on imposing it, and 
who " falls on dark mountains " and meets with infinite 
disaster, in thus following out the uncompromising law 
of her development, when she comes in contact and into 
conflict with the crushing forces of circumstance, and 
finds the world quite other than her pygmy and per- 
emptory conception of it — finds it not only not ductile, 
but pitilessly despotic. Nothing could be finer than 
such an idea, nothing more interesting than the essay, 
with its incarnating illustration, in which it is expressed. 
The defect — at least the distinction — of the charac- 
ter is that the idea was born before, and conditions, its 
embodiment. With all her characterization, therefore 
— the invariable light green of her costume, for exam- 
ple, on which her creator leans with such evident 
helplessness — Gwendolen is imperfectly exteriorized. 
Always in exteriorization George Eliot's touch shows 
less zest than in examination. At times it is fatigued, 
often infelicitous, and now and then grotesque; De- 
ronda's mother, with her orange dress and black lace 
and bare arms, is a caricature, a mere postulate of her 
profession of public singer. And not only is Gwendolen 
ineffectively presented : she is incompletely reahzed as 
an individual, in virtue of her creator's absorption in 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

ner typical significance. You are impressed by her 
interest in her own personality as a significant moral 
trait, but you are more interested in the trait than in 
the personality ; the personality is more elusive, not 
quite varied enough ; what else does she do, think, feel, 
say, besides explicitly exhibit egoism ? one asks. Like 
every other character of her extraordinary creator, she 
is thoroughly in character. She is conceived and ex- 
hibited with an absolutely informing consistency, and 
with a strictness unusual even in psychological fiction. 
Mr. Hardy, for instance (such stress does he lay on the 
ewig Weibliche), makes two women, whom he takes 
pains to show as of the most disparate organizations, 
do the same thing — - act in a way which if natural to 
one of them, would, for that very reason, be out of 
character in the other. 

But consistency is not only not completeness, not 
fulness, not variety, not productive of special interest 
and pleasure : it is a decidedly inferior element in the 
production of illusion, the illusion that is a condition 
of vitality in a character of fiction. Beside unex- 
pectedness it is, in this regard, of no merit whatever. 
The consistency of Bulstrode, Tito, Felix Holt, ends by 
boring us. You want a personage in a book as out of 
it to act in a way that you cannot everlastingly prefigure. 
To surprise but not shock expectant intelligence in- 
volves, however, the aid of the creative imagination. 
And we have only to turn from Gwendolen to Daniel 
Deronda himself to realize how much George Eliot's 

114 



GEOKGE ELIOT 

other faculties exceeded her imagination. She is for 
once unhampered by any scientific subscription to the 
laws of reality. She has almost with gaite de comr 
abandoned, in this instance, her old reliance of obser- 
vation aided by sympathetic divination. She has made 
Deronda out of whole cloth. She has done everything 
for him, and spared no pains to make him attractive 
and personal. He has a " grand face," though a young 
man ; his smile is occasional and, therefore, " the re- 
verse of the continual smile that discredits all expres- 
sion." He is just what she wants to make him — her 
imaginative ideal. He is no more real than Charlotte 
Bronte's Kochester. We owe him entirely to his 
author's creative imagination. The result is aptly 
enough implied in a letter written — obviously in 
Scotch — by Stevenson to a reviewer friend, when the 
book came out. " Did you — I forget," he says, " did 
you have a kick at the stern works of that melancholy 
puppy and humbug, Daniel Deronda himself ? the 
Prince of Prigs ; the literary abomination of desolation 
in the way of manhood; a type which is enough to 
make a man forswear the love of women, if that is how 
it is to be gained." The whole structure and color of 
the book indeed (Gwendolen and her affairs apart) may 
be said to be George Eliot's one explicit imaginative 
flight and — shall we say therefore ? — her one colossal 
failure. 

The irresponsible imagination has certainly much to 
answer for as an element of fiction and a factor in its 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

composition. But at the present day it is plainly super- 
fluous to dwell on the fact. The weight of current 
criticism is altogether against it, whatever the practice 
of the hour. And not only in fiction but in plastic art 
the errors for which it is no doubt justly held responsi- 
ble have come to wear the aspect of solecisms. The 
application of a realistic standard is become almost in- 
stinctive. What is imaginative seems imaginary, and 
beauty that is not also obviously truth has lost its in- 
timate appeal. There are signs of reaction, and no 
doubt the "image-making" faculty will again receive 
the recognition that for the moment more or less ex- 
clusively rewards the observation which normally — 
and notably in most very notable works of art — has 
the humbler role of verification and correction. And 
the reason is that creation is inconceivable without it. 
The criticism that constructs in fancy an inherent an- 
tagonism between it and truth is blind to the fact that 
it is through the imagination that the human mind ar- 
rives at truth as well as at error. Discovery is ideally 
deduced ; it is the guerdon of hypothesis — without 
which, in the field of art, at all events, the mind rests 
in the suspense that has been noted as a mark of hys- 
teria. In science, not less than in art, synthesis is an 
imaginative process. In a word, the truth-loving scep- 
tic of the imagination is confuted by the inevitable pro- 
cedure of the mind, and must admit the platitude that 
to see that a thing is so it is necessary first to see the 
thing. In all art worth talking about, therefore, the 

116 



GEORGE ELIOT 

imagination is inevitably present. It may count as a 
feeble or as a powerful force. It may shine by the 
beauty, by the truth of the images it constructs or 
evokes, or be obscured by the data accumulated for its 
justification by diligent induction. But empirical scru- 
tiny and sharpness of perception will never take its 
place. And its absence means an artistic vacuum. 
With George Eliot it certainly counts for proportionally 
less than it does in any great writer of fiction. Of 
course there are compensations, as I have endeavored 
to indicate. One need not prefer " Monte Cristo " to 
" Middlemarch." 

Apparently in this respect of the imagination, as in 
others, she did not herself sufficiently recognize the 
genuineness of her vocation as a novelist. At all 
events she did not depend on it. Yet there are 
characters and situations, there are in fact whole 
novels, among her works which show that it would 
have triumphantly withstood any strain she might 
have put on it. " The Mill on the Floss," the " Scenes 
of Clerical Life," show what her genius left to itself 
could, unaided, accomplish. But she was not content 
to leave it to itself. She had other ambitions — am- 
bitions which she could attain, which a woman with 
less intellect (there have been none with more) could 
not, which would attract less a man of equal genius,^ 
which the very circumstance of her sex — given her 
environment on the one hand and her powers on the 
other — teased her toward with a fatal explicitness. 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

"See that you hold yourself fast by the intellect," 
said Emerson in a famous passage, the acme of his 
eloquence. "It is this domineering temper of the 
sensual world that creates the extreme need of the 
priests of science; and it is the office and right of 
the intellect to make and not take its estimate." 
Never was this ideal more enthusiastically followed 
than by George Eliot. She illustrates it even a little 
literally. The result is a certain dryness, a certain 
mechanical effect for which unimaginative is just the 
epithet. She brought her mind to bear on everything, 
and almost ceremoniously, so to say. This was clearly 
enough instinctive with her. There is nothing arti- 
ficial in it. And this saves it from pedantry. She 
was intellectually very high-bred. There is not a hint, 
a shadow of vulgarity in any of her books. She is at 
home with the very best and has no inclination for 
anything else ; she has no moments when her sense for 
the excellent relaxes and sags into irresponsibihty. 
Without austerity — without much humor, too, surely, 
except in so far as the appreciation implies the posses- 
sion of it — she is never tempted into caricature. She 
has no excess of high spirits thus to mislead her, but 
in any case her taste is a sure reliance. Her taste, in- 
deed, is the part of her intellectual equipment that is 
perhaps most clearly instinctive. ^sthetically con- 
sidered it is less trustworthy, but in the intellectual 
sphere — where taste has an important office — it 
shows itself a certain winnower of the worth while 

118 



GEORGE ELIOT 

from the common. If at need it tolerates the common- 
place, it is because the particular commonplace has its 
significance ; and if it is a little eager in its apprecia- 
tion of the significant which is also the eccentric, it is 
because it is easily and aristocratically at home with 
eccentricity itself. It is absolutely — singularly — free 
from display. In that sense, at all events, she was not 
in the least a pedant. Her pedantry, to call it so, was 
pedantry in the sense of literalness — and seen as such 
mainly from an aesthetic view-point. Her erudite, 
even recondite, air, at times, is perfectly in accord with 
the most thorough-going simphcity. It is wholly 
natural. A sentence incrusted with erudition and 
intricate with logical involution is with her a native 
and unpretentious expression. Any pedantry, in other 
words, to be detected in her writings is apt to be a 
matter of form, an error from which the aesthetic sense 
alone (in which she was conspicuously deficient), and 
no amount of intellect, can protect one. Even if now 
and then the substance is as flat as the statement is 
solemn, it is never tinctured by that variety of medi- 
ocrity which is of the essence of pedantry and which 
we know as vulgarity — there is not in all her writings 
a touch or a trace of it, as I have said. "All her 
eagerness for acquirement," she says of Dorothea, " lay 
within that full current of sympathetic motive in which 
her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. 
She did not want to deck herself with knowledge — to 
wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

action." That is very nobly said, and. it is doubtless 
autobiographic. But did ever such "eagerness for 
acquirement" as that of Dorothea's creator character- 
ize any other novelist of her calibre ? And erudition, 
however triumphantly assimilated, aside, the sponta- 
neity that vivifies its creations is of a different order 
from a pure exercise of the intellect, however instinc- 
tive. And this spontaneity she may be said to have 
so instinctively alloyed with reflection, so transmuted 
by thought, that often she seems to lack it altogether. 



Its absence is particularly apparent in her style. 
One may speak of George Eliot's style as of the snakes 
in Iceland, ^he has no style. Her substance will be 
preserved for " the next ages " by its own pungency or 
not at all. No one will ever read her for the sensuous 
pleasure of the process. She is a notable contradiction 
of the common acceptation of Buffon's "/e style cest / 
rhomme." Her very marked individuality expresses 
itself in a way which may be called a characteristic 
manner, but which lacks the " order and movement " 
that Buffon defined style to be when he was defining 
it instead of merely saying something about it. In 
itself, moreover, this is not often a felicitous manner. 
It is inspired by the wish to be pointed, to be complete, 
to give an impeccable equivalent in expression for the 
content of thought, to be adequately articulate. In <^ 

120 



GEORGE ELIOT 

-A her aim at exactness she neglects even energy. Her ■ 
statements are scientific, but never even rudimentarily 
rhetorical, if we except the use of irony, in which she 
was sometimes very happy. Of modulation she never 
seems to have thought. Any element of periodic qual- 
ity, of rhythm, of recurrence, of alternation, succession, 
inversion, for the sake of effect, decorating instead ofy 
merely expressing significance, she would no doubt 
have eschewed had any ever occurred to her, as plainly 
it never did. Ehetoric of any degree, in short, prob- 
ably seemed to her meretricious if — which one 
doubts — she ever considered it at all. She was the 
slave of the meaning, hypnotized apparently by thex' 
sense, and deaf to the sound, of what she wrote. Her 
taste was noticeably good in avoiding the pretentious, 
but her tact was insufficient to save her from the com- 
plicated and the awkward. Her puritan predilections 
should have suggested simplicity to her, but simpKcity 
is the supreme quality which she not only wholly lacks, 
but never even strives for ; the one salient characteris- 
tic of her style — of her manner of writing, that is to 
say — is its complexity. 

Thus there are no " passages," either " fine " or in 
any way sustained, in her works ; at least I think of 
none, and if any exist I suspect they are put into the 
mouth of some personage with whom they are " in 
character" — in which case they would be sure to be 
very well done indeed. Every sentence stands by 
itself; by its sententious self, therefore. The "wit 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

and wisdom " of the author are crystallized in phrases, 
not distilled in fluid diction. Their truth strikes us 
sharply, penetrates us swiftly; the mind tingles agree- 
ably under the slight shock, instead of glowing in ex- 
pansive accord and dilating with gradual conviction. 
Often these sentences have the force, the ring, of prov- 
erbs — of those of Solomon, too, rather than those of 
Sancho Panza. Some of them, on the other hand, have 
the air less of the Sibyl than of " saws," and suggest 
the wiseacre more than the philosophic moralist. At 
times they have the trenchant crispness of La Eochefou- 
cauld; at others, even in the novels, the unravelled 
looseness premonitory of the appalling Theophrastus 
Such. The manner naturally takes on the character 
of the substance, and we have thus this formal senten- 
tiousness — now epigrammatic, as I say, and now otiose 
and obscure — because of the writer's exclusive con- 
secration to the content, which itself varies, of course, 
from the pithy to the commonplace. Her defective 
aesthetic feeling, her lack indeed of the aesthetic sense, 
nowhere comes out more clearly than in this absorption 
in the significance, to the neglect of the aspect, of the 
picture she is presenting. This picture, and even the 
personages who people it, seem to have for her at least 
a disproportionate attraction in virtue of their typical, 
to the exclusion of their individual, interest — sharply 
individualized as her characters are in the matter of 
psychology alone. She seems so impressed with their 
universal appeal and representative office, with the 

122 



GEORGE ELIOT 

principle her facts illustrate and enforce, with the 
ulterior meaning and value of her " criticism of life," 
as to have at all events distinctly less zest in depicting 
than in defining her material. For fiction this indubi- 
tably means a tame style. 

Lacking in aesthetic feeling as she was, she was 
probably more or less conscious of this. Her attempts 
to circumvent it are now and then deplorable. They 
are invariably verbiage of one kind or another. The 
refuge of pedantry in its endeavor to escape dulness 
is apt to be sportiveness, and it is perhaps when she is 
playful that George Eliot comes nearer pedantry than 
at any other time. Even in moments when her erudi- 
tion seems elaborate and essentially inapposite, we are 
always conscious that it does not seem so to her, and 
that not only is there no parade about it, but also 
neither is it in the least mechanical. It is the native, 
however awkward, expression of a kind of tempered 
enthusiasm. At times, certainly, the sense of humor ■ 
failed her equally with the assthetic sense, of which in 
a large — or strict — sense it is, of course, a subdivision; 
and the artist who could objectively reproduce such 
humor as that of "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the 
Floss" could also, when it came to self-expression, 
illustrate the very acme of dulness. Her facetious- 
ness is, at its worst, as bad as Dickens's; and, at her 
worst, she writes as badly, without the mitigation of 
his extraordinary high spirits and infectious hilarity. 
Without, too, his bad taste, though with, as I said, the 

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tactlessness which is the next thing to it. The moral 
element in taste involves self-respect. And in any- 
thing moral George Eliot is never deficient. Her intel- 
ligence saves her ; it is too serious, it has too much 
poise, and it sees temptation as a kind of sophistry — 
temptation, I mean, to put up with the second rate on 
account of its tinsel, for example. But the tact that 
shows one when he is hitting and when he is missing 
the mark, she does not infallibly possess, and often 
when, apparently, she seems to herself to be exhibiting 
the light touch, she is bravely ponderous. With a 
little more tact, a little more humor, a little more 
aesthetic sense, some of her significance might have 
been even more striking, and certainly some of it would 
not have seemed so absolutely flat. 

But why discuss her style at all, one asks one's self. 
No one can have any doubt that, though, in general, it 
serves her well enough, and sometimes expresses ade- 
quately the most searching subtleties of observation 
and reflection, nevertheless its idiosyncrasies are de- 
fects. And of style in any large sense surely no 
oreat writer ever had so little. Her constant refer- 
ences in her letters to her " art " have an odd sound. 
Yet even here one's last word must be a recognition of 
the extraordinary way in which her intellect atones for 
sensuous deficiencies. Could two better words be 
found, for a slight example, to characterize the first 
impression Kome makes on the stranger than " stupen- 
dous fragmentariness " ? One of her characters, " like 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

most tyrannous people, had that dastardly kind of self- 
restraint which enabled him to control his temper 
where it suited his convenience to do so." The adjec- 
tive is felicity itself. And in her letters one can see 
how safely her intelligence guides her through the 
museum maze of plastic art for which she had so little 
native feeling, but in which less than many an aesthetic 
temperament is she either imposed upon or unappre- 
ciative. In art, as in life, she has an acute sense, if not 
a sensitive feeling, for what is distinctly worth while. 

VI 

No one, however, as I have intimated, would infer her 
personality from her style — certainly not that trait of 
her personality which, in spite of her apotheosis of the 
intellect, distinguishes her from the so-called intellect- 
ual woman, and which I take to be intimately charac- 
teristic. In books or in fact the first impression made 
by the so-called intellectual woman is that of the in- 
adequacy of the intellect. There is so much else that 
is admirable, one reflects in the presence of such 
thorough-going exclusions. The attractiveness of the 
susceptibility and even the will is thrown into effective 
relief. Intuitions seem to gain a new sanction, in- 
stinctiveness a new charm, spontaneity a new grace, 
irresponsibility a new excuse — qualities intimately 
associated with women. The limitedness of the intel- 
lect, the distant view of sympathetic relations — fancy, 

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unexpectedness, clairvoyance, all lying without its con- 
fines — become depressingly plain. One naturally reacts 
under the exaggerated emphasis of importance and all- 
sufficiency that the intellect receives from the intellect- 
ual woman in general, whose consecration to it is so 
complete, so obvious, so naively unconscious of what 
exists beyond its pale. It is not so much that she is 
too intellectual. At times one finds that she might be 
even more so, even if less strictly so, with advantage. 
It is that she seems to be unaware that compared with 
character or even temperament the intellect itself is 
terribly concrete and communicable. And perhaps 
there is nothing that sets George Eliot off from those 
of her sex for whom the intellect is a universal 
talisman, so much as the circumstance that she does 
not make this impression. On the contrary, one's im- 
pression is of the plenary power and sufficiency of the 
intellect unaided and unillumined ah extra. So search- 
ing and fruitful are its processes as exhibited in her 
works ; so pregnant are the discoveries of her scrutiny 
and reflection in the heretofore unexplored regions of 
human character and moral relations ; so pithy are her 
deductions ; so stimulant is her turning of her " allow- 
ance of knowledge into principles " (as she says of 
Dorothea), that one feels almost that other faculties 
are surplusage, and that the field of fiction as well as 
that of science belongs to the intellect, thus shown to 
be capable unaided of such distinguished results. 
Other relations, one feels, remain to be discovered, 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

other principles to be formulated, other mysteries of 
thought and passion and conduct, of the real world 
and the correlative ideal one, to be solved by this 
magic divining-rod, this mighty crystallizing force. 
Partly this impression is produced by George Eliot's 
superiority. Intellect enough is its own sanction and 
imposes itself. But partly also it is due to her person- 
ality, to a temperamental richness of nature, that for 
the moment imposes on us even her own attitude, which 
is, nevertheless, that of the fanatical worshipper at the 
intellect's shrine. 

How early her complete consecration to the things 
of the mind took place would doubtless have been dif- 
ficult for herself to tell. It must, however, have been 
in the nature of a conversion. She was doubtless 
always, as she describes Dorothea, "ardent, theoretic, 
and intellectually consequent," but the break which 
she made with her early traditions and beliefs must 
have been in the nature of a transformation from a 
nature emotional and expansive because fundamentals 
are settled, into one in which scepticism stimulates in- 
quiry and which, therefore, in proportion to its serious- 
ness, is driven to aggrandize the intellect, which is the 
instrument of inquiry. This change, whether or no 
induced by her acquaintance with the sociologists and 
positivists whom she met when she first began literary 
work, antedates her work in fiction, which fact and the 
fact that it was a change can hardly fail to account for 
much in this fiction. It is, in a word, the work of a 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

woman, of an extraordinarily intellectual woman, of a 
woman who had come to concentrate her interest and 
effort within purely intellectual Lines after a spiritual 
experience in which the emotions probably played a 
predominant part. Its notable complexity is hardly 
surprising. 

Her environment probably accounts for the evolu- 
tion of her genius. Nothing could be less favorable to 
the harmonious development of the intellectual side of 
Mary Ann Evans, one would say, than the environment 
of Mrs. Lewes, even though she may have been con- 
verted from " orthodoxy " before going to London at 
all. Science, which spared Dorothea and never made 
the acquaintance of Maggie TuUiver, took possession of 
her. Metaphysic, philosophy, sociology, theology en- 
thralled her " ardent, theoretic, and intellectually con- 
sequent " nature. Her emotional side, which one may 
judge not only from early accounts but from the very 
latest was wonderfully sensitive and refined, became 
forthwith subordinated instead of developed, so far as 
regards its expression in her very objective books. She 
became, even in the intellectual field, almost the ideal 
non-conformist. Other points of view, which she ap- 
preciated wonderfully, she appreciated through compre- 
hension rather than sympathy. She was too objective 
for altruism of the mind, even. Her writings are al- 
most invariably marked by elevation, but elevation to 
which there is no lift. Her spirit has no wings. Her 
letters show her stoicism to have been severely ethical 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

and without sentimental alloy. To do good to others, 
to look at the practical results of our actions and not 
bother about how we feel concerning them, is very- 
much the sum of her credo. Of God, Immortality, 
Duty, the last only is left to us, Mr. Myers dolefully 
records her as asseverating. This may be true, of 
course, but, even so, to be preoccupied with its truth 
must inevitably be a handicap to a writer of imagina- 
tive fiction — God and immortality connote so much 
ideality. 

Her thinking was eclectic and shows the lack of 
comradeship, of harmony and accord, of those foster- 
ing influences of concert under which thought flowers 
in luxuriant spontaneity. " Our duty is faithful tradi- 
tion where we can attain it," she makes the solemn 
Deronda assert. But faithful tradition is just what she 
did not attain — just what practically, I think, she 
came to have very little feeling for. She wished in- 
stead to "prove all things," for which operation she 
had indeed an admirable equipment, but in which she 
showed too exclusive a zest. Tradition at all events 
never dupes her. Nothing amuses her more than — in 
the best taste always, assuredly — to expose the insub- 
stantiality of its pretensions on just occasion. The net 
result of her mature theory and practice is a noble 
work performed for truth, somewhat to the neglect of 
the beautiful and the good, except in so far as these 
benefit indirectly from any service done to truth. And 
even so far as truth itself is concerned, though we get 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

unexpected, felicitous and cogent glimpses of it — and 
what is more, a sense that its deeps are both inexhausti- 
ble and infinitely alluring — nevertheless one feels that 
there is an order of truth itself for which the intellect 
alone has not quite the test, and which is of overmas- 
tering significance, though it can only be imaginatively 
perceived. " II faut avoir la foi et ne pas croire," says 
Claude Bernard. All dogma quite aside, it is certain 
that George Eliot once possessed what we know (but 
do not understand) as " faith," and that when she wrote 
her novels she had substituted for, instead of adding to, 
it the sapient scepticism unveiling illusions that is 
such an integral element of her fiction. She is in con- 
sequence more nearly unique; she is more isolated; 
but she is also less authoritative and less complete. 
There is therefore an atmosphere of cause and effect, of 
fatalism, of insistent and predetermined gloom which 
pervades her books and which is hostile to the variety 
pertinent to a report of nature that is round and full. 
In this way her microcosm is a little more distorted 
than perhaps it need have been, but for her conversion 
— her whole-souled conversion — to positivism. 

VII 

Would she have done better to have followed what 
I take to have been her native bent ? Who would wish 
any great writer different ? Who would take the risk ? 
Yet I must say I think there would be a minimum of 

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GEORGE ELIOT 



risk in the case of George Eliot. And for this reason.; 
Her development seems to me to have proceeded on 
lines increasingly inharmonious with her native endow- 
ment. Her temperament was an ardent one, yet in- 
creasingly contained instead of exercised. Her whole 
nature was tremulously sensitive to impressions, and it 
constantly steeled itself to systematic reflection. Her 
faculty of observation was marvellous, and she became 
more and more of a recluse as time went on. She ab- 
sorbed altogether the best part of her material — that 
of which her first books and " Middlemarch " are com- 
posed—before she began to write at all ; afterward her 
material was necessarily so extraneously attained as to 
be by comparison factitious. She was, if not pro- 
foundly, at least acutely, religious, and she became a 
positivist. Intimately emotional, avidly exigent of 
sympathy, having that imperious need of giving one's 
self which assails truly independent but affectionate 
souls, her expression steadily grew in impassibility and 
in a stoic consideration of the impersonal as the highest 
good; and duty to others — to the community, the 
world, the race indeed — became a sort of refuge for 
her ideality. When one thinks of her early years and 
their associations, her precocity and emotional develop- 
ment, and then of the immense spiritual contrast in- 
volved in her work in London, her union with Lewes, 
her friendship with Mr. Spencer, her emancipation, if 
one likes, and the subsequent seclusion which certainly 
had its ideal, but also inevitably its artificial side — 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

when one follows tlie evolution of her genius from the 
earlier books through " Komola," " Middlemarch," and 
" Daniel Deronda " to " Theophrastus Such," getting 
gradually further away from her native substance and 
quality, and ending in comparative ineptitude, one 
comprehends her marriage and surcease from activity. 
She had re-entered regularity, had ceased to be excep- 
tional and " attained tradition " — in the words I have 
already cited. It could not be that she should not rest 
in a kind of peace unattainable through conscious 
effort and intimately grateful after a life of intense 
mental activity further stimulated by an elevated and 
really ideal, but nevertheless peculiar position. No- 
thing is more touching than Mr. Cross's account — of 
a delicacy in itself equivalent to poetry — of her last 
years. She had done her work. And it had been 
done during a sort of prolonged excursion into the 
realm of science, where the native temperament and 
genius, that might otherwise have powerfully modified 
the product of an extraordinary intellect, had been de- 
flected if not repressed. 

For no judgment of George Eliot can be discerning 
which does not consider the vital fact that she was — 
even in a degree really typical — a woman. She be- 
longed to the subjective sex, and is the most objective 
of novelists. It is the fashion at present to neglect the 
distinction of sex in speaking of women, and pay them 
the compliment, or do them the justice, of treating 
them severally as individuals, discriminated merely as 

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GEOKGE ELIOT 

men are discriminated. Nevertheless until their dis- 
tinction in certain fields of activity is as much a matter 
of course as that of men — until there are no more 
" Women's Buildings " at world's fairs, for example, and 
the propaganda in favor of the sex as an entity ceases 
to obscure the individual standard which naturally 
tends to get itself established if let alone — anything 
like the eminence of George Eliot's powers will be sin- 
gularized because of the possessor's sex. It is — as yet 
— generally remarkable, worthy of remark, that a 
woman should have reached such a height of accom- 
plishment. But that her accomplishment should have 
been in the field of thought rather than in that of feel- 
ing, and so splendidly successful in this field as almost 
to have originated a species in the domain of fiction, is 
specifically the notable phenomenon in George Eliot's 
case. Why is she so unlike George Sand and Charlotte 
Bronte? — one may exclude Jane Austen, in thinking of 
precedents, as exclusively an artist. Is it because of 
her different and in the main superior mental quality, 
and the greater subordination of feeling to thought in 
her original make-up? Probably not. Whatever 
George Eliot became there can be no doubt that Mary 
Ann Evans was a woman in whom the idiosyncrasies 
of sex were particularly developed. As to the exist- 
ence of such idiosyncrasies and their native, elemental, 
and possibly ineradicable character George Eliot herself 
never had any doubts. The difference between the 
sexes is one of the phenomena that compose her ma- 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

terial. Her writings are full of man considered as 
man, and woman as woman. She has widened the 
sphere of woman's interest for us, but has not obscured 
its identity. The impartiality of her view, however, 
excludes the patronage which the as yet, perhaps, more 
susceptible sex is as yet quick to feel, and her caustic 
treatment of masculine foibles excuses her occasional 
dry compassion for what the author of "Janet's Ee- 
pentance " calls " poor women's hearts ! " 

" Poor women's hearts " ! What became of hers 
in the transition from Miss Evans to George Eliot 
through Mrs. Lewes ? one cannot help speculating. Its 
interests certainly grew both more limited and less con- 
crete — more limited in the sense involved in her iso- 
lation, her concentration of feeling within the smallest 
of circles and her absorption, in geometrically increas- 
ing ratio, in the things of the mind ; less concrete as 
her ethics took on more and more a humanitarian color, 
and the good of society in general became the main 
concern of her speculative meditation. One has only 
to imagine Mr. Casaubon more human, less a pedant, 
more a real scholar and minus his littlenesses, to divine 
that Dorothea might have developed into a philosopher 
of moment, losing in the process the edge of those qual- 
ities that render her so sympathetic to Lydgate, to 
Ladislaw and to ourselves. Had she, under such cir- 
cumstances, written novels, they might easily, like 
those of her creator, have been note worthily objective, 
and have missed the personal charm of native feminine 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

genius which is now so conspicuously characteristic of 
her. Had George EHot not fallen in love with science ; 
had not her feeling for the world of her girlhood 
atrophied with the loss of faith in its standards, so that 
she got more and more domesticated in a foreign en- 
vironment, and even predisposed to exotic themes, sug- 
gested by intellectual and acquired rather than native 
and sentimental interests — " Eomola," " The Spanish 
Gypsy," and " Daniel Deronda," for instance ; had she 
not given the rein to her curiosity and become absorbed 
in the world of books, of literature rather than its raw 
material, which she could nevertheless handle to such 
admirable ends ; had she not, as it were, made herself 
over into an intelligent force from being a person with 
idiosyncrasies, and expressly subordinated the suscepti- 
bility in which, not only as a woman, but as an in- 
dividual, she was so strong, to the more purely intel- 
lectual development which she could only share with 
so many masters, we should have had works of un- 
doubtedly more charm, and, such was the native force 
of her genius, of equal power. We should have had, 
in fine, more books like " The Mill on the Floss " ; 
" Middlemarch " would have been more condensed; 
"Felix Holt" would have been dramatic; we should 
have lost "Eomola," perhaps, but we should have es- 
caped " Daniel Deronda." It is not that, as is so often 
the case with writers who study significance rather 
than form, her early books are superior to the later 
because the sense of selection is more acute and ex- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

elusions more rigorous at the beginning of a career 
than at its apogee, when everything that occurs to the 
author seems to him for that reason worth saying. 
They are superior because, unlike the later ones, they 
are cast within the lines of her native capacity, because 
they do not call for imaginative power, for artistic syn- 
thesis and dramatic vigor, but amply illustrate her 
sympathetic feeling, her closeness of observation, her 
faculty for loading with serious significance and almost 
ominous suggestion the most ordinary and unpreten- 
tious data of human life by drawing out their typical 
quality at the same time that they are psychologically 
differentiated in a way to make them extraordinarily 
individual and real. " Depend upon it, my dear lady," 
she says in her first story, " you would gain unspeak- 
ably if you would learn with me to see some of the 
poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, 
lying in the experience of the human soul that looks 
out through dull gray eyes and that speaks in a voice 
of quite ordinary tones." That is George Eliot's truest 
note, and it is a note struck by no one else ; we have 
nowadays plenty of fiction woven around dull gray 
eyes and voices of ordinary tones, but the experience 
of the human soul is not often what these express. It 
is a note also which is far less prominent in the writer's 
later novels, the novels that help us to understand 
what Mr. George Moore means by saying that she 
"tried to write like a man." One feels like replying 
to Mr. Moore, that at least she succeeded. But any one 

136 



GEORGE ELIOT 

who agrees with me in dividing her books into two 
groups, those written before " Eomola " and those writ- 
ten afterward, will hardly find it fanciful to see in the 
former a native, and in the latter an acquired, point of 
view and manner of treatment. When one considers 
the potentialities of the author of "The Mill on the 
Floss" — a work in which passion and the tumult of 
the soul are not objectively analyzed but sympatheti- 
cally portrayed with unsurpassed vividness and elemen- 
tal power, a work which is undisputably one of the 
great literary epitomes of the pathos and tragedy of 
human existence — it is hard to reconcile one's self to 
the evolution in which temperament disappeared so 
completely in devotion to the intellect alone as to re- 
sult in the jejune artificiality of " Daniel Deronda." 

It would be idle, and certainly I have no disposi- 
tion, to belittle the value of the literature produced 
between these two books. " Eomola " is unique in its 
way, and has hosts of admirers. There are readers to 
whom it introduced the Italian Eenaissance, who in 
its pages first read of Florence, Savonarola, the Medici. 
There are scholars who shared George Eliot's enthu- 
siasm for " the City by the Arno " and " the wonderful 
fifteenth century " so cordially as to credit " Eomola " 
with having successfully reproduced a moment and a 
milieu which they were only too grateful to have re- 
called. Besides, there is that masterpiece of evolution, 
the character of Tito Melema. " Felix Holt " contains 
at least the lovable Mr. Lyon, and though the weari- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

some wordiness of the book is a handicap from which 
it will always suffer, it will always remain a highly in- 
terpretative picture of a momentous epoch in English 
pohtical and social history — the birth, in fact, of the 
modern English world engendered by the Eeform Bill. 
" Middlemarch " any one can praise. It is probably the 
" favorite novel " of most " intellectual " readers among 
us — at least those who are old enough to remember 
its serial appearance. It is, indeed, a half-dozen novels 
in one. Its scale is cyclopaedic, as I said, and it is the 
microcosm of a community rather than a story con- 
cerned with a unified plot and set of characters. And 
it is perhaps the writer's fullest expression of her phi- 
losophy of life. 

VIII 

It is these books and " Daniel Deronda," rather than 
the earlier "Scenes of Clerical Life," "Adam Bede," 
" Silas Marner," and " The Mill on the Floss," however, 
which determine her position as so much less an artist 
than a moralist. She is in truth a moralist, and a 
moralist of the first class. I do not of course mean the 
sense in which F^nelon, for example, or Paley is a 
moralist. Expressly and in form a novelist of her rank 
is an artist, in whose work the moral significance is 
either spontaneously generated or incidentally induced. 
But essentially and spiritually speaking, George Eliot, 
whatever her superficial classification, is so far less an 
artist than a moralist that it is as the latter that she 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

is of value to us and is most likely to appeal to the 
future. It is as a moralist that she is a real contribu 
tor to literature, that she is at her best, that she is of 
the first class, and that, among novelists at least, she is, 
if not unrivalled, at all events unsurpassed. No such 
explicit " criticism of life " as hers exists in fiction. 
Thackeray, for example, is a moralist, too. He was 
very fond of his office of " week-day preacher." But 
he is a moralist not only because his picture of life is 
so true and vital, but in virtue of moralizing, of com- 
menting on his story and his characters, drawing out 
their natural suggestions, weaving around them a web 
of artistic embroidery, eliciting and enforcing the lesson 
they contain. With George Eliot the story and char- 
acters themselves are conceived as examples and illus- 
trations of the moral she has in mind to begin with, 
and a part of its systematic setting forth. The moral 
is her first concern. Her characters are concrete — re- " 
markably concrete — expressions of pure abstractions, 
not images. Arthur Pendennis is the result of an 
attempt to depict the average man of his day and 
station. Tito Melema incarnates the idea that shrink- 
ing from the unpleasant is subtly and tragically de- 
moralizing. There can be no doubt as to which is the 
creation of the more specific and unalloyed moralist, 
George Eliot's " moralizing " is always a sort of logical 
coda or corollary of the moral idea or truth which her 
character or incident happens to be illustrating, and 
is never the artistic moral suggestion of the subject. 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

This is probably why it is tolerably dull, so often. It 
is apt but inferred, sound but not spontaneous. At 
any rate, it is not in her obiter that her success as a 
moralist lies : it is in the very essence, subject and at- 
tributes of her work. 

This world was not to her the pure spectacle it is 
to the pure artist, nor even the profoundly moving and 
significant spectacle it is to the reflective and philo- 
sophic artist. Its phenomena were not disjecta membra 
to be impressionistically reproduced or combined in 
agreeable and interesting syntheses. They were data 
of an inexorable moral concatenation of which it in- 
terested her to divine the secret. What chiefly she 
sought in them was the law of cause and effect, the 
law of moral fatality informing and connecting them. 
Since the time of the Greek drama this law has never 
been brought out more eloquently, more cogently, more 
inexorably or — may one not say, thinking of Shake- 
speare ? — more baldly. But at the same time she 
makes human responsibility perfectly plain. No atten- 
tive reader can hope for an acquittal at her hands in 
virtue of being the plaything of destiny. She is more 
than mindful, also, of the futilities as well as the trag- 
edies of existence, and, indeed, gives them a tragic 
aspect. " Middlemarch," for example, read in the light 
— the sombre light — of its preface, is a striking show- 
ing of her penetration into the recesses of the common- 
place, and of the else undiscovered deeps which there 
reward her subtlety ; with the result, too, of causing 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

the reader to reflect on infinity, as he does after a look 
through the telescope or microscope — an efifect only to 
be produced by a master. But in neither the tragic 
nor the trifling does she engage the freedom of the in- 
dividual, and if she shows the victim in the toils of 
fate, she shows also with relentless clearness how op- 
tionally he got there. Her central thought is the tre- 
mendous obligation of duty. Duty is in a very special 
way to her " the law of human life." The impossibility 
of avoiding it, the idleness of juggling with it, the 
levity of expecting with impunity to neglect it, are so 
many facets of her persistent preoccupation. The 
fatality here involved she states and enforces on every 
occasion. " Tito was experiencing," she flashes at us, 
" that inexorable law of human souls that we prepare 
ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of 
good or evil that determines character." Transome's 
illusion, she says, lay in his " trusting in his own skill 
to shape the success of his own morrows, ignorant of 
what many yesterdays had determined for him before- 
hand." The " note " appears again and again. It is a 
diapason whose slow and truly solemn vibrations, com- 
municated to their own meditations, all of her thought- 
ful readers must recall. 

Her books are apt to close in gloom, but they leave 
you with courage. They contain the tonic of stoicism ; 
and no one can be ungrateful to stoicism who has ex- 
perienced the soundness of its solace in dark hours. 
At the same time, whatever one's personal predilections 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

in such a matter, one must admit that stoicism itself 
has experienced the vicissitude of evolution, and the 
modern stoic has, ancestrally at least, passed through 
the phase of Christianity. It would be the part of 
wisdom not to forget the fact, one would say — just as 
it is to yield the geocentric conception of the solar 
system, without too much recalcitrant argumentation. 
" The sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the char- 
acter ; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way 
to the soul," says Arnold. George Eliot is a modern 
Epictetus — Epictetus plus, of course, the modern 
Weltschmerz. One would compare her with Marcus 
Aurelius only in thinking of Arnold's further words 
about him : " The effusion of Christianity, its rf lieving 
tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, 
one feels, for which his soul longed; they were near 
him, they brushed him, he touched them, he passed 
them by." She, too, passed them by. Was it because 
her girlhood was so precocious that she could not see 
the forest for the trees of ignoble controversy which in 
post Eeform Bill times had such luxuriant growth, and 
for which she had such sharp eyes — times she herself 
deplores as " days when opinion has got far ahead of 
feeling," when Dissent had a "theoretic basis," and 
polemical discussion abounded ? Was it because she 
was converted by Comte and satisfied with Mr. Spen- 
cer's famous "system" — having largeness enough, by 
the way, to harmonize the two ? At all events, it is 
certain that her mature philosophy does not take ac- 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

count of the miracle of grace. As a moralist this is 
her great defect, or rather deficiency. That subtle 
dynamic impulse of the will which the psychologists 
leave the theologians to describe as " the new birth," 
and which, as a matter of fact, fills a tremendous role 
in the drama of cause and effect, she makes little of. 
It lay natively within the folds of her sympathetic 
mind in earlier years, as " Janet's Eepentance," for ex- 
ample, sufficiently witnesses, and it is certainly one 
of the most familiar of phenomena. We may know 
nothing of it, empirically, ourselves, but it is certainly 
as common as any other moral agency, if not indeed 
more common than all others. Moreover, not only are 
its energy and its effects to be observed in others, and 
in all ranks of the intellectual scale, from Philip's 
eunuch to Saul of Tarsus, from a crowd of Moody and 
Sankey penitents to the last French realistic raffing, 
but every modern consciousness which looks deeply 
into itself discerns therein the potentiality of it — a 
potentiality definite enough to be at least a demonstra- 
tion of its existence elsewhere. The miracle of grace, 
in a word, is a common enough and prominent enough 
factor in the universal moral problem to reward if not 
exact the attention of the artist who is also a moralist, 
and in excluding it the modern stoic exhibits a real 
limitation. 

Its exclusion from the consideration of so eminent 
a moralist as George Eliot is undoubtedly due to the 
lack of imagination and the^ predominance of intellect 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

already noted in her genius and her practice. It is 
itself closely allied with mysticism, no doubt ; it be- 
longs, perhaps, in the domain of mysticism. And to 
deal with the mystic, or even to entertain an inclina- 
tion to deal with it, necessitates the possession of the 
imaginative faculty and its cordial, unembarrassed, 
spontaneous activity, undeterred by fear of error and 
unrestrained by backward or side glances at the quite 
otherwise seductive data of ascertained truth. There 
is no shade of mysticism in George Eliot's moral phi- 
losophy, whose tenets and whose logic proceed from 
the processes of the mind and have little relation with 
" the vision " without which, says the wise man, " the 
people perish." Everything is taken on the side of it 
that appeals to the intelligence. Gwendolen comes to 
grief because she does not reahze that domination is 
impracticable — because, in a word, of intellectual 
bhndness. Grandcourt's baseness is an intellectual 
perversion, not a sensuous one. The story of Tito's 
mere repugnance to what is unpleasant becoming at 
last readiness for any crime is the story of a moral de- 
cline exhibited in a succession of mental phases. Even 
error is a kind of alienation and sin essentially a mis- 
take. The notion of " dying to " it nowhere appears — 
I do not mean pro forma, in which shape perhaps it be- 
longs less to literature than to dogma, but by implica- 
tion. We are still in the penumbra, one would say, of 
the Old Testament. The natural results of error, the 
natural and integral sanctions of morality are con- 

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GEORGE ELIOT 

vincingly, refreshingly, and stimulatingly considered 
to the exclusion of the preternatural ; but the natural 
content of religion is quite neglected. Here, as else- 
where, she takes the scientific, the intellectual view of 
the phenomena which compose her material, and with 
her the mind in this field excludes the soul as in the 
field of art it does the imagination. 

But with whatever limitations, her position as a 
classic is doubtless assured. There are types of human 
character of which she has fixed the image in striking 
individual incarnation for all time ; and her philosophy 
is of an ethical cogency and stimulant veracity that 
make her fiction one of the notablest contributions ever 
made to the criticism of life. It is none the less true, 
to be sure, that her survival will mean the surmount- 
ing of such obstacles to enduring fame as a limited 
imaginative faculty, a defective sense of art, and an 
inordinate aggrandizement of the purely intellectual 
element in human character, which implies an imper- 
fect sense of the completeness of human nature and the 
comprehensiveness of human life. But no other novel- 
ist gives one such a poignant, sometimes such an insup- 
portable, sense that life is immensely serious, and no 
other, in consequence, is surer of being read, and read 
indefinitely, by serious readers. 



145 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



MATTHEW AENOLD 

I 

How different in a critical aspect from its condition 
when Arnold began to write is the England of our day 
— England and its literary dependency, ourselves ! 
And how largely the difference is due to the influence 
of Arnold's writings ! Thirty years ago he was deemed 
a dandy and a dilettante in literature. To-day his para- 
doxes are become accepted commonplaces. No writer, 
probably, ever passed so quickly from unpopularity 
through fame to comparative neglect ; and this not be- 
cause he illustrated the passing phase of popular thought 
and feeling, to which on the contrary he was generally 
in antagonism, but because his victory over philistinism 
was so prompt and his " bruised arms " were so soon 
"hung up for monuments." Was there ever a time, 
one asks one's self, when Anglo-Saxon critical taste 
was truculent ; when measure and restraint were 
viewed with contempt, and mere erudition with rever- 
ence; when rhetoric as such was admired; when rod- 
omontade and fustian were tolerated nominis umbra; 
when " curiosity " was discountenanced and disinterest- 
edness despised; when poise, good temper, politeness 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

were negligible ; when " allowing one's consciousness 
to play freely" was a meaningless rather than a trite 
phrase ; when, in a word, Arnold's various deductions 
from his cardinal tenet of the value of culture seemed 
insubstantial and trivial ? Yet to nine out of every 
ten of its comparatively few readers, when " Essays in 
Criticism " was first published, such a phrase as " How 
trenchant that is, but how perfectly unscrupulous," 
in characterization of Mr. Kinglake's rhetoric, was 
probably a complete revelation. There is, then, we 
said to ourselves, such a thing as rectitude outside 
the sphere of morals, and for us the point of view 
itself of criticism suddenly shifted. 

Who now, except in wilful indulgence, enjoys what 
used to be admired as " prose poetry "? Yet at the time I 
speak of who was there that was not slightly puzzled by 
such a statement as : " All the critic could possibly sug- 
gest in the way of objection would be perhaps that Mr. 
Kuskin is there trying to make prose do more than it 
can perfectly do ; that what he is there attempting he 
will never, except in poetry, be able to accomplish to his 
entire satisfaction " ? Of course, our practice has not 
made the same progress as our principles. Practice is 
largely a matter of temperament, and the Anglo-Saxon 
temperament a pretty, constant quantity. But what- 
ever our practice, our standard would nowadays con- 
form to Arnold's declaration that " the true mode of 
intellectual action " is " persuasion, the instilment of 
conviction." And if one seeks a concrete instance 

150 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

of the great advance made in English critical writing in 
the past twenty-five years, mainly through the agency 
of that culture for which Arnold was always contending 
and in whose triumphs he is surely entitled to share, a 
very striking one is furnished by the contrast between 
the state of things at present and that existing when he 
inquired, " Why is all the jourTieyman-worh of literature, 
as I may call it, so much worse done here than it is in 
France ? " 

His work, in short, is there to speak for itself. The 
poor have the gospel of culture preached to them, and 
his phrases are now at the end of every current pen. 
His ambition is no doubt disclosed in the happy lot he 
predicts for Joubert — "to pass with scant notice 
through one's own generation, but to be singled out 
and preserved by the very iconoclasts of the next, then 
in their turn by those of the next, and so, like the 
lamp of life itself, to be handed on from one generation 
to another in safety." But his fate has been to receive 
abundant notice from his own generation. Doubtless 
in spite of having been perhaps prematurely dissem- 
inated he will be preserved and handed on to Bacon's 
" next ages." There is certainly enough pollen in his 
essays to flower successively in many seasons and as 
long as the considerations to which he consecrated his 
powers interest readers who care also for clear and 
charming and truly classic prose. But what I wish to 
point out is that he has already received a large share 
of his reward, and that this is itself proof of the quality 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

of his merit, which is moral as well as critical and 
poetic; that this, in a word, designates his niche in 
the temple of the classics. To have one's gospel so 
promptly accepted demonstrates that it has been 
preached. He had, in a word, a mission. And he 
has fulfilled it. Falkland's ideal, he said, " conquers 
slowly, but it conquers." His own has, at least as an 
ideal, conquered already. 

II 

What especially singularizes Arnold, personally, 
among the writers of his time and for his public is 
that, in a more marked and definite way than is to be 
said of any of them, he developed his nature as well as 
directed his work in accordance with the definite ideal 
of reason. He had probably little disposition origi- 
nally to swerve from the pursuit of this ideal, but he 
made of it an aim so constant and so conscious as to 
illustrate it with great distinctness in his life as well as 
in his writings. The pursuit of perfection that he 
preached he practised with equal inveteracy. But in 
this pursuit he sought first of all completeness of har- 
monious development, and to the Greek he added the 
Christian inspiration. His own translation of the 
quality celebrated by St. Paul, " sweet reasonableness," 
was the chief trait of his character — the " note," to use 
the expression he borrowed from Newman and popu- 
larized, of his personality. His reasonableness was 
tinctured with feeling, his stoicism was human, his 

152 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

temper affectionate, his aim benevolent, and his man- 
ner gentle. But he rarely lost the poise that he ad- 
vocated so sedulously, and his gentleness for being 
ingrained failed no whit in vivacity or in force. The 
" Saturday Eeview" furnished him some amusement once 
by accusing him of being a transcendentalist, but there 
was nothing of transcendentalism in him. He was par- 
ticularly hard-headed, indeed, and the invincible opti- 
mism and- generous illusions of Emerson, for instance, 
seemed to him irretrievably insubstantial. Professor 
Dowden, whose apology for Shelley he reviewed rather 
drastically, collects from his " Letters " an interesting 
series of judgments of his eminent contemporaries, as 
follows : 

Tennyson is " not a great and powerful spirit in any 
line " ; with all his " temperament and artistic skill " he is 
" deficient in intellectual power." Mrs. Browning is " hope- 
lessly confirmed in her aberration from health, nature, 
beauty, and truth." Thackeray is "not, to my thinking, a 
great writer." The mind of Charlotte Bronte " contains 
nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage." Froude has 
" very sinister ways of looking at history." Freeman is "an 
ardent, learned, and honest man, but he is a ferocious 
pedant." Stubbs "is not ferocious, but not without his 
dash of pedantry." Mr. Hutton, of the " Spectator," has 
" the fault of seeing so very far into a millstone." Bishop 
Wilberforce has a " truly emotional spirit," but " no real 
power of mind." Carlyle " I never much liked. He seemed 
to me to be ' carrying coals to Newcastle,' as our proverb 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

says ; preaching earnestness to a nation which had plenty of 
it by nature." Henry Taylor is " not very interesting; he 
talks too slow, and is a little pompous." Victor Hugo is 
not to be taken " so prodigiously au serieux " as Renan 
seems to take him. Swinburne is " a sort of pseudo-Shelley," 
with a " fatal habit of using a hundred words where one 
would suffice." Seeley is lacking in lucidity. Disraeli's 
speeches are " heavy pompous pounding," and Gladstone's are 
"emotional verbiage." Lord Salisbury is a " dangerous man, 
chiefly from want of any fine sense and experience of litera- 
ture and its beneficent functions." 

These judgments publicly expressed might savor of 
censoriousness, but they were of course expressed in in- 
timate correspondence and therefore show, to any but 
the censorious, how scrupulous Arnold was in his dis- 
crimination, how little he suffered himself to be im- 
posed upon by the seductiveness of contemporary 
admirations, so powerful to any but an instinctively 
critical mind. 

The " Letters " were disappointing to readers who 
perhaps unwarrantably looked in them for the litera- 
ture which he limited to liis writings, though the fact 
that he did so attests the precision, almost inconsistent 
with spontaneity, with which he ordered his activities. 
The " Letters " have been subjected to an unknown 
quantity of editing, but it is evident that they were 
adjusted to the measure of his correspondents' capaci- 
ties and not expressive of his own. This, nevertheless, 
s a cii-cumstance that has its advantage and shows a 

154 



. MATTHEW ARNOLD 

very charming side of him. The " Letters " leave the 
impression of a singularly elevated soul, living habitu- 
ally on a high plane. Spite of their lack of accent and 
incident they repay more than one reading, for this 
reason; and they bring out into a stronger light the 
qualities deducible from his works. They testify hap- 
pily to shortcomings rather than defects. 

He lacked the edge at least of the aesthetic faculty. 
In Italy he was preoccupied with botany rather than 
with the fine arts, and though it is perhaps too much 
to ask of any Englishman that in any environment he 
should forget his botany, still the slight impression the 
artistic wealth of Italy seems to have made upon him, 
judging from the " Letters," is significant of a sensuous 
side well under control. In the matter of art he specu- 
lated only ; and in a general way, after the fashion of 
the " Laocoon." Nor is his sense of humor conspicu- 
ously spontaneous. It has the aptness of wit even 
where it is not, as is generally the case with him, dis- 
tinctly wit rather than humor at all. His wit, how- 
ever, is distinguished. It seasoned even — or I may say, 
especially — his controversy to an extent that makes 
literature of it. Voltaire's is more fundamental, more 
important, more vital, but it is not more exquisite. Ee- 
nan's is less pointed. I recall no instance in which it 
misses fire. One can read the passages it illuminates 
again and again, and always with a renewed feeling of 
that intimate pleasure born of the appreciation of wit 
alone. A considerable number of dignities bear its scars, 

155 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

but there is hardly a case in which these have not been 
bestowed in the interests of truth. The rejoinder to Mr. 
Newman's reply to the " Lectures on Translating 
Homer," for example, is a unique piece of sustained 
irony absolutely impeccable in its restraint within the 
limits of self-proving statement. A dozen other in- 
stances, of a pungency thoroughly personal, will occur to 
any reader familiar with his works. 

His wit, however, thoroughly personal in its pun- 
gency as it is, is an instrument rather than a medium 
with him, as I have intimated. Outside of it he cer- 
tainly lacked that indefinable but very definite element 
of character that we know as temperament. Lacking 
energy, he lacked also the genius of which he himself 
afifirmed energy to be the main constituent. He freely 
acknowledged this, and made the best of it. He made, 
in fact, a great deal of it. Without in the least over- 
rating himself he took himself with absolute serious- 
ness, and his work from first to last is informed with 
the high sincerity of a consistent purpose — the purpose 
of being nobly useful to his time and country by preach- 
ing to them precisely the gospel he conceived they 
most vitally needed. For the consideration of his pub- 
lic and his era he deemed energy less important than 
light, earnestness less needful than sweetness, genius 
less beneficent than reasonableness, erudition less 
called for than culture. 

To the advocacy of these ends he brought an es- 
sentially critical spirit. He was in endowment and in 

156 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

equipment the first of English critics. Among English 
critics, indeed, he stands quite alone. No other has his 
candor, his measure of disinterestedness, his faculty of 
extracting their application from the precedents indi- 
cated by culture. But he is also eminently an English 
critic. Disinterestedness pure and simple, disinterested- 
ness to the point of detachment he neither illustrated 
nor believed in — much as he advocated the free play 
of consciousness in dealing with subjects of vital con- 
cern. He gave the widest extension to the term moral 

— as, for example, when he comments on Voltaire's 
praise of English poetry for its greatness in moral ideas 

— but there is unmistakably the moral element of pur- 
pose in both his criticism and his poetry, which ranks 
him, I repeat, as a critic and poet who is not merely 
nor even mainly an artist but is an apostle as well. 



Ill 

It is natural, therefore, that his criticism, even his 
purely literary criticism, should be altogether syn- 
thetic. It is even didactic. He had, it is true, a re- 
markable gift for analysis — witness his Emerson, his 
clairvoyant separation of the strains of Celtic, Greek, 
Teutonic, inspiration in English poetry, his study of 
Homeric translation, his essays on Keats and Gray. 
But in spite of his own advocacy of criticism as the art 
of "seeing the object as in itself it really is," and his 
assertion that " the main thing is to get one's self out 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

of the way and let humanity judge," he was himself 
never content with this. He is always concerned with 
the significance of the object once clearly perceived 
and determined. And though he never confuses the 
judgment of humanity (to use his rather magniloquent 
expression) by argumentation and special pleading, his 
treatment of his theme is to the last degree idiosyn- 
cratic. He unfolds it and lets it speak for itself, but 
he is prodigiously interested in the process, and we, in 
turn, are interested in the happy fashion in which he 
conducts it. Sometimes, indeed, in this way, the pro- 
cess eclipses the product, and you remember such 
felicities as his "epoch of expansion" and "epoch of 
concentration," without quite remembering to which he 
assigns Burke or Shakespeare ; or you recall his 
" method " and " secret " of Jesus without quite bear- 
ing in mind which is which. His machinery, in a 
word, sometimes rivets attention. And this is even 
more strongly attested by the fact that it is occasion- 
ally so obvious as to arouse irritation in readers in- 
sensitive to its nice adjustments and rhythmic repeti- 
tions, in which case the product also is doubtless 
missed altogether. 

Moreover, no pure analyst (such as Sainte-Beuve), 
occupied with the endeavor to see the object as in itself 
it really is, would evince so much interest in its con- 
notation. Arnold is interested in removing — often in 
satirizing — the current misconceptions of it. He does 
not write of Milton and Goethe, but of "A French 

158 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Critic on Milton," " A French Critic on Goethe," to 
show how differently these popular idols are estimated 
by a disinterested critic from the way in which they 
are estimated popularly. In his panegyric on Falk- 
land, he is thinking also of Mr. Freeman. He notes 
the literary influences of academies because they are 
just such as he conceives useful to check and discipline 
the " freaks " and " violences " of Mr. Palgrave, and to 
temper the provinciality of Mr. Kinglake. Never has 
the missionary spirit of which I have spoken been 
exhibited with more charm and more distinction — less 
associated with its customary concomitants. But 
never, also, has it been more mistakably illustrated. 
" Eeal criticism," he says, " obeys an instinct prompting 
it to try to know the best that is known and thought 
in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and 
everything of the kind." This is the burden of the 
stimulating essay on " The Function of Criticism at the 
Present Time." But instead of the disinterestedness 
which he advocates in such interested fashion, Arnold 
was always mightily concerned about practice and 
politics and everything of the kind. Given his geneal- 
ogy and environment, he could hardly be other than 
he was. He was bound to interest himself in the 
Burials Bill, the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, the law 
of bequest and entail, the Crimean War, the Irish 
Home Eule question, ritualism, the popularization of 
the Bible, the question of better secondary education, 
the question of the classics versus the sciences, and so 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

on. " The Englishman has been called a political an- 
imal," he says, and he was, as I have said, very much 
of an Englishman. And quite as much as his social, 
political, and religious writings, his literary criticism is 
explained by the circumstance that he was the son of 
Dr. Arnold of Kugby, and his environment the Eng- 
land of our day. 

He had, however, unmistakably his own way of 
being an Englishman, and if his concern was moral and 
his aim didactic, as they certainly were, the disinter- 
estedness he inculcates appears in his method. One 
may say, in fact, that his motive is didactic and his 
method disinterested. His criticism thus becomes 
truly constructive. In form he does not dogmatize, 
he deduces ; he does not argue, he elucidates ; he uses 
his subject to illustrate his idea. His idea, indeed, is 
his formal subject, however near his heart its applica- 
tion may be. He deals with ideas directly, and his 
genius for generalization appears even where he is 
most pointedly and pithily specific. The essay on 
" Equality " is an excellent instance. He is concerned 
about the specific advantage of restricting the English 
freedom of bequest and the consequent distribution of 
wealth. But he advocates the reform by presenting 
the idea of equality in the most attractive, disinter- 
ested, and detached way, as if it were merely a literary 
thesis. The disinterested free play of consciousness 
that he celebrates in criticism is usually displayed in 
analysis — notably in French criticism, of which he is 

160 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

thinking, where in any given case the synthesis is apt 
to be assumed. (For, I suppose it will be admitted 
that in criticism the French are further along than 
ourselves, that is to say, can safely take more for 
granted.) But with Arnold the disinterestedness ap- 
pears in the detailed construction of a thesis, whose 
central idea on the other hand is apt to be an abstrac- 
tion held interestedly, to which abstraction the con- 
crete parts have the relation of purely contributory 
exposition. 

It is obvious, therefore, that his criticism differs in 
kind from that of other writers. It differs especially 
from that most in vogue at the present time. It is 
eminently the antithesis of impressionist criticism. It 
has behind it what may fairly pass for a body of 
doctrine, though a body of doctrine as far as possible 
removed from system and pedantry. It is wholly 
unfettered by academic conventions, such as, citing 
Addison, he calls " the sort of thing that held our fa- 
thers spellbound in admiration." But it is still more 
removed from the irresponsible exercise of the nervous 
system however attuned to taste and sensitized by cul- 
ture. Certain definite ideas, held with elastic firmness 
but not developed into any set of procrustean princi- 
ples, formed his credo, and his criticism consisted in 
the application of these as a test and measure of quality 
and worth. Their simplicity and their searchingness 
made their application fundamental, whether or no in 
every case it was either sound in emphasis or sufficient. 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

There is a great deal more to be said of Homer than 
that he is simple, rapid in thought, rapid in move- 
ment and noble, but these things are at least essential. 
Emerson is to many readers something more than " a 
friend and aider of the human spirit," but not something 
other. Shelley's poetry is undervalued in exclusive 
censure of its insubstantiality, but insubstantial and, in 
a vital sense, vapid much of it unquestionably is. 
Joubert will probably not outlive Macaulay, but what 
he stands for undoubtedly will. Victor Hugo is vastly 
more than a great romance writer, but a poet " of the 
race and lineage of Shakespeare " he is not. 

Arnold passed his intellectual life indeed, whatever 
his didactic strain, in the world of ideas. No English 
writer, certainly, is richer in them. He touched nothing 
that did not set his critical imagination at work. He 
saw things in their bearings, and saw in them something 
ultimate as well as something actual. His imagination 
being critical and not fanciful, there was of course an 
order of ideas that did not attract it. He not only 
neglected the notional and the trivial, but the merely 
curious, whether scientific or aesthetic ; ideas insuscepti- 
ble of application to Hfe did not claim his attention. 
Possibly this may be felt as a limitation if one compares 
him with Sainte-Beuve, who nevertheless, in some in- 
stances, paid for his universality the penalty of fatuity, 
just as even Goethe's pursuit of completeness legiti- 
mately earned for him Paul de Saint Victor's epithet 
" the Jupiter Pluvius of ennui." But as compared with 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

any English writer, certainly with any modern English 
writer, Arnold's plenitude of ideas can only be obscured 
by the circumstance that he so ordered and marshalled 
his array of them that the subordinate ones escape 
readers who note only the general lines along which 
these are grouped and to the relief of which they beauti- 
fully contribute. There is no obiter to arrest the run- 
ning reader, but the very texture of the treatment of 
all his very definite and salient theses is woven of 
ancillary ideas of enough stimulus to furnish the entire 
equipment of an inferior writer. In a general way — 
for example, in his advocacy of culture — he illustrates 
as well as enforces his theme. And not incidentally — 
which would of course make a greater show — but 
organically. One may cite a dozen examples — such 
as, in small, " A Speech at Eton," where the single 
word enLELKeia is made the nucleus of a really wonderful 
web of suggestiveness ; such as, and 2)ar excellence, the 
" Study of Celtic Literature " and the " Lectures on 
Translating Homer." 

His criticism is distinguished also from much that 
is currently popular in being wholly non-scientific. To 
begin with, it is interested very largely in the one ele- 
ment that eludes the scientific spirit — the element of 
personality. It does not ignore the substantial con- 
tributions that the scientific spirit has made to the 
theory and the practice of criticism. It merely con- 
cerns itself, and in a personal way mainly, with material 
that is too highly organized to be satisfactorily consid- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

ered when considered materially, according to Taine's 
famous method. It is not occupied with origins — a 
subject that has an almost universal interest at the 
present day — nor much with relations, the study of 
which for being more literary is hardly less scientific. 
To Arnold apparently the study of heredity and en- 
vironment involved in literary criticism based on " the 
man, the moment and the milieu" theory, has very 
much the interest that the process of running up all 
our manifold appetites and emotions into the two primi- 
tive instincts of self-preservation and reproduction 
would have, and no more. It is sound enough, no 
doubt, but in large measure superfluous — at any rate 
elementary. What is really interesting is the efflores- 
cence not the germ, nor even the evolution of the 
germ — I mean from a literary or any but a strictly 
scientific point of view. Similarly the study of rela- 
tions, upon which the incontestably useful classification 
of developed literary phenomena is based, interests him 
only cursorily. It is distinctions, rather, that his criti- 
cism considers. In the difficult effort to " see the ob- 
ject as in itself it really is" his method is that of 
definition through distinguishing the object as it really 
is from the various appearances that dissemble it, and 
from those of its own phases, ancestral or circumstan- 
tial, that may account for but do not exhibit it. 

Taine, who in proclaiming his method disclaimed 
having a system, but who certainly applied his method 
most systematically, wrote history, to be sure, rather 

164 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

than criticism, and called history " applied psychology." 
His psychology, too, is of an extremely physiological 
cast. And neither history nor physiological psychology 
ever engaged Arnold's attention in dealing with litera- 
ture. But Taine's point of view prevails widely with 
more or less modification in pure literary criticism. A 
critic quite otherwise psychological, the late Edmond 
Scherer, for example, adopts it substantially in main- 
taining that "out of the writer's character and the 
study of his age there spontaneously issues the right 
understanding of his work." This is the contention of 
followers of the " historical method," who are far from 
being as systematic as Taine or as temperamentally 
inclined to consider literary phenomena as impersonal, 
irresponsible, and ultimately mechanical. Of this as- 
sertion, that a right understanding of an author's work 
will thus spontaneously issue, Arnold himself says: 
" In a mind qualified in a certain way it will — not in 
all minds. And it will be that mind's ' personal sensa- 
tions '" — "personal sensations" being precisely what 
M. Scherer wishes to circumvent in the historical 
method of criticism. To him, for example, the lauda- 
tion of Milton by Macaulay is an expression of " per- 
sonal sensations " ; as to which Arnold aptly remarks : 
" It cannot be said that Macaulay had not studied the 
character of Milton and the history of the times in 
which he lived. But a right understanding of Milton 
did not 'spontaneously issue' therefrom in the mind 
of Macaulay, because Macaulay's mind was that of a 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

rhetorician, not of a disinterested critic." Arnold's 
own theme is the personal element in the works of 
others, and its treatment is frankly the application to 
these of this element in himself. The report it gives 
is the result, though this personal report is, as I began 
by noting, very different from an impressionist report 
in being carefully controlled and corrected by culture, 
framed, in fact, in accordance with the express prin- 
ciple of classic comparisons that he eloquently advo- 
cates and specifically illustrates in his essay on " The 
Study of Poetry," and as far removed from irresponsi- 
bility as if it claimed scientific exactness. 

His subject, indeed, although as I have intimated 
almost always an idea or a number of associated ideas, 
is often ideas illustrated or exemplified in some per- 
sonality. It is what Joubert, Keats, the Gu^rins, 
Heine, Byron were themselves and what, in relation to 
ideas, they stand for, in each instance. It is not at all 
how they came to be what they were, their evolution, 
the influences of their environment of time and place, 
or their influence in turn upon their age and succeed- 
ing ones. In brief, though their general interest is 
always drawn out, in contradistinction to the specific 
interest of pure portraiture, they are not generalized. 
They are neither depicted as, for example, Sterne is 
depicted by Thackeray, nor accounted for as Shake- 
speare is accounted for by Taine. Their qualities not 
their tendencies, on the one hand, and on the other 
their essential and intrinsic not their accidental quali- 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ties, and of these only the typical and significant ones, 
are dealt with. They are considered in the light of 
their relation to literature, but nevertheless distinctly 
as personalities whose relation to literature, too, is a 
personal relation. Arnold's criticism may be loosely 
characterized as literature teaching by examples, just 
as history has been called philosophy so teaching. 
Only, his examples are not the various literary works, 
isolated, taken seriatim, or grouped, but the significant 
and illustrative writers in whose personalities them- 
selves appear most definitely and concretely visible — 
thus fused, unified and at the same time most elabo- 
rately as well as most subtly presented — those literary 
phenomena that have the most critical value. To Car- 
lyle history is the annotated record of great men. To 
Arnold criticism is the pertinent characterization of 
great writers, in the mind and art of whom their works 
are co-ordinated with an explicitness and effectiveness 
not to be attained by any detailed and objective analy- 
sis of the works themselves. 

Nothing is commoner than to hear literature classi- 
fied as creative and critical, with the inference of 
mutual exclusiveness between the two branches and 
the marked inferiority of criticism to what is called 
creation. Arnold performed a signal service in char- 
acterizing literature as " a criticism of life " and thereby 
revealing even to the unreflecting the essentially criti- 
cal nature and function of the truly creative " thought 
of thinking souls" — to recall Carlyle's definition of 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

literature itself. His emphasis was of course on the 
word "life," but the incidental implication as to how 
literature is concerned with its proper " content " has a 
value of its own. To deal with life powerfully and 
profoundly is to deal with it critically. And in this 
fundamental sense the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " and 
the " Ode to Duty " are themselves criticism. No one 
would pretend that specifically they belong to the 
literature of criticism, however, though they illustrate 
the importance of the critical element in literature in 
showing that their true superiority to many other 
creative works of their kind is their soundness and 
elevation as criticism — as criticism of life. Specifi- 
cally the literature of criticism is concerned with litera- 
ture rather than directly with life. But in this way 
and in a sense it has the office and character of a court 
of appeal, and its functions may be as honorable — as 
its roll is as distinguished — as those of any other de- 
partment of Kterary activity. So far as a priori spec- 
ulation is concerned, it is entitled to immunity from 
jejune formularies about the superiority of creation to 
criticism, as such, and of books to books about books. 

What criticism lacks, and what will always be a 
limitation to its interest and its power, is the element 
of beauty which it of necessity largely foregoes in its 
concentration upon truth. It is less potent and persua- 
sive than poetry, than romance, not because in dealing 
with literature rather than directly with life it occu- 
pies a lower or less vital field but because its province 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

lies outside the realm of all those puissant aids to co- 
gency and impressiveness that appeal to the sense of 
beauty and accordingly influence so powerfully not 
only the intellect but the emotions as well. But of its 
service to truth there can be no question. Its role is 
not confined to exposition, to interpretation. It is a 
synthesis of its naturally more or less heterogeneous 
subject. It is a characterization of art as art is a char- 
acterization of nature. And in characterizing, it trans- 
lates as art itself translates. It is only in criticism 
that the thought of an era becomes articulate, crystal- 
lized, coherently communicated. And real criticism, 
criticism worthy its office — criticism such as Arnold's 
— contributes as well as co-ordinates and exhibits. It 
is itself literature, because it is itself origination as 
well as comment, and is the direct expression of ideas 
rather than an expression of ideas at one remove — 
either chronicling their effect on the critic after the 
manner of the impressionist or weighing them accord- 
ing to some detached and objective judicial standard. 



IV 

Public questions interested Arnold acutely and his 
discussion of them was always suggestive if not conclu- 
sive. He dealt most successfully perhaps with those 
that were mainly social in their nature. The essay on 
" Equality," for example, is one of his best. That on 
" Democracy " is hardly its equal. Both are, however, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

eminently stimulating because they deal with general 
principles and are, as the former asserts, " for the 
thoughts of those who think," at the same time that the 
commendation of equality as an ideal is convincingly 
buttressed by the salutary way in which laws of be- 
quest are shown to operate in correction of the natural 
tendency to inequality; and that such penetrating re- 
marks as " We have never yet been a self-governing 
democracy, nor anything like it," illustrate and enforce 
his discussion of the more political theme. In his 
dealing with questions of general public interest, in- 
deed, it can be said of him as he said of Burke's treat- 
ment of politics, that he " saturated them with thought." 
But in more purely practical politics he was naturally 
less at home. Irish Home Eule obsessed him in his 
later years, but to an American sense at least, he was 
not happy in his treatment of it even from the political 
philosopher's point of view; and from the politician's 
what he said never, probably, seemed very cogent, as 
he was of course very well aware. He used to express 
surprise at American sympathy with Irish separatism, 
and compare Irish coercion with our Southern coercion 
as though the " unionism " of the two were identical. 
Like most Englishmen he made in this the two mistakes 
of presupposing our interest in the welfare of England 
quand mime and as against Ireland in case of the two 
clashing, and of fancying the disruption of a homo- 
geneous people parallel to the separation of two peoples 
intensely inter-hostile. All that he wrote about the 

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MATTHEW AKNOLD 

Home Kule question is no doubt already forgotten, 
though much of it was pungent and all of it patriotic. 

On the other hand his " Friendship's Garland " is a 
little classic. The section entitled " My Countrymen," 
in especial, is a perfect piece of writing, full of the most 
delicate irony, by turns playful and mordant, and 
enough in itself to establish his eminence both as a wit 
and as a satirist. British political philistinism was 
never so deftly flayed. The essay on " British Liberal- 
ism and Irish Catholicism," a plea for a Catholic uni- 
versity in Ireland, is a forcible and luminous discussion 
of much larger import than the title in itself would im- 
ply. But Arnold never touched the great subject of 
education without illumining it, and he has treated 
many phases of it, not all of which by any means re- 
late particularly to the problems of his own country. 
The principles upon which he based his argumentation 
are of universal pertinence; and his conception of edu- 
cation as eminently a public concern and one of the 
most vital of public interests, his view of the importance 
to civilization of what is called secondary education and 
his exhibition of the relation of schools to culture count 
as so many contributions to literature itself. 

Culture, of course, is his central theme. His name 
is popularly and rightly more closely associated with it 
than with anything else. It is his notable reliance and 
recommendation in every department of thought and 
action with which he occupies himself — religious, 
poetic, critical, political, social — his gospel, in a word. 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

Culture lie defines as " a pursuit of our total perfection 
by means of getting to know, on all matters which 
most concern us, the best which has been known and 
thought in the world; and through this knowledge, 
turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our 
stock notions and habits which we now follow stanchly 
but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a vir- 
tue in following them stanchly which makes up for the 
mischief of following them mechanically." He exhibits 
and illustrates its value eloquently and convincingly, 
showing, in a dozen ways, how it inspires correctness 
and corrects errors. It is his universal solvent. He 
applies it in discussing questions of all sorts, the most 
practical as well as the most abstract. From it he de- 
rives a number of general principles which its pursuit 
of perfection involves. In the first place culture in- 
volves the ideal of perfection as residing in " an in- 
ward condition of the mind and spirit and not in an 
outward set of circumstances " ; then as harmonious, an 
expansion of all the powers for beauty and for good of 
human nature ; then as a general expansion wholly at 
variance, for example, with the maxim of " every man 
for himself." From this he deduces its salutary appli- 
cation to the phenomena of the large mechanical and 
external element in modern civilization, of our Anglo- 
Saxon individualism, of our want of flexibility, our 
concentration upon one aspect of a thing and our blind- 
ness to its other sides, our faith in " machinery " as an 
end in itself — the machinery variously known as free- 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

dom, population, railroads, wealth, churches, political 
institutions. It is evident that the idea of culture has 
endless applications. The chapter titles of " Culture 
and Anarchy " would suggest them to any one who had 
never read the book — " Sweetness and Light," " Doing 
as One Likes," " Barbarians, Philistines, Populace," 
" Hebraism and Hellenism " and so on. Numbers of 
epitomizing sentences from the same work might be 
cited to show them ; for example : " No man, who 
knows nothing else, knows even his Bible," or, " And 
to be, like our honored and justly honored Faraday, a 
great natural philosopher with one side of his being and 
a Sandemanian with the other, would to Archimedes 
have been impossible." There are delicious pages in 
" Culture and Anarchy," and its vivacity no longer ob- 
scures its soundness, probably, even for readers of the 
temperament of those in whom when it first appeared 
it awakened discomfort if not dislike. Every one now- 
adays is theoretically a friend of culture — even the 
strenuous. 

He was not particularly happy in dealing with 
America. He could not let us alone. He seemed to 
be haunted by the desire to subject us, also, to his dis- 
crimination. But he could not, I fancy, quite charac- 
terize us to his satisfaction. At least a tentativeness 
that is almost touching, certainly very charming, is to 
be felt in his most systematic efforts to do so. When 
he lectured here he was more than circumspect, he was 
cautious; yet at the same time he was very coura- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

geously conscientious in what he said to us and of us. 
He was very desirous of complimenting us by avoiding 
flattery and of in this way increasing the value of what 
good he could say. The public no doubt " caught the 
idea/' but he failed a little perhaps to convey its im- 
portance, to communicate to us the importance that 
he himself — most complimentarily — seemed to attach 
to it. Our public — even our lyceum public — though 
hospitable enough, is not very conscious of its need 
for the medicine of sincere and searching criticism. 
Its misgivings are few, and there is something lusty 
about its good nature. It imagines that it is something 
of a critic itself. It found something a little superfine 
and superfluous in the attempt to tell it delicately that 
it was gross. 

The "Discourses in America" undoubtedly read 
better to-day than they sounded then. That on Emer- 
son is surely one of the most appreciative as weU as 
most discriminating things ever written about its sub- 
ject, and is on a very high plane. The "Literature 
and Science" is delightful, a real vade mecum for the 
humanist. The discourse on "Numbers," however, 
which is the one most specially American in its subject 
and address, is, like the rest of his writings on America, 
decidedly less authoritative than his writings on almost 
any other theme. The fact is not surprising. As a 
theme we must be acknowledged to be tryingly in- 
choate, elusively heterogeneous. A still greater diffi- 
culty is presented by the absence of precedents in our 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

case. In a sense we are necessarily more unlike any 
European people than any European people is unlike 
any of its fellows. There is a break in environment 
which minimizes the element of ancestry in our evolu- 
tion. And our inherited traits are modified by an 
altogether exceptional eclecticism in "institutions." 
The notion that underlies the discourse on " Numbers " 
is that we are essentially the English middle class, 
upper and lower, because we have no aristocracy and 
no populace — at least apart from immigration. The 
error is shared by most European writers about Amer- 
ica, who forget that even the English middle class tm- 
modified by either the aristocracy or the populace would 
be very different from its present self. Perhaps it 
might be less " vulgarized " if it had no " materialized " 
class to weigh it down, and no "brutalized" class to 
sustain its self-conceit. In any event, to preach to us 
the now famous doctrine of the remnant is to miscon- 
ceive us. We have a "remnant" of our own whose 
activities instead of exalting our esteem of " remnants " 
tend to make us suspicious of them. It represents the 
survival of the fittest only through artificial selection, 
and, on the other hand, even if the rest of the nation 
were " sacrificed to it," as Arnold says the English are 
to the production of their aristocracy, the result would 
be less " splendid." He says somewhere that the Eng- 
lish " have no people, only masses -with vulgar tastes." 
But so far, at all events, and, as I say, immigration 
apart, our majority is exactly describable as " people " 

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VICTOKIAN PKOSE MASTERS 

rather than as "masses/' with vulgar or, indeed, any 
other tastes. Our " average man," accordingly, other 
things being equal, is apt to inspire more confidence 
and receive more respect than our exceptional man — 
unless the latter be (like Lincoln, for example) simply 
our average man raised to a higher power. But even 
in his writings on America, where their application is 
occasionally less apt than elsewhere, Arnold's general 
principles are, as elsewhere, cogent, stimulant, and 
suggestive. 



His distinction as a religious writer has been im- 
perfectly perceived, which is singular, considering the 
very great religious influence that he has exerted. It 
consists in the way in which he has brought out the 
natural truth of Christianity. That is the sum and 
substance of " Literature and Dogma," of " God and the 
Bible," and of the " Last Essays on Church and Eelig- 
ion," even of "St. Paul and Protestantism." No one 
has felt more deeply, and no one has so clearly ex- 
pressed this essence of religion denuded of dogma and 
stripped of the husks of its traditionary sanctions. To 
him religion was as definite a realm as poetry. He 
distinguished it from ethics in very much the way in 
which poetry differs from prose, and characterized it 
as "morality touched by emotion." Eeligious truth, 
even, he distinguished from scientific truth in saying 
that " truth of science does not become truth of religion 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

until it becomes religious." For a time his readers 
hardly knew what he meant. His gospel was so sim- 
ple as to be startling. "Literature and Dogma" was 
taken to be an attack on at least a vital and integral 
part of Christianity. And it must be confessed that 
its sprightly rhetoric, through which, however, it got 
its hearing, gave some color of justification for the 
grief of the judicious, to whom what he called Aber- 
glauhe was inextricably bound up with the most pre- 
cious verities. The solemn " Spectator " was betrayed, by 
temper, probably, into speaking of his ideal as Chris- 
tianity without God — as Comte's scheme has been 
satirized as Catholicism minus Christianity. What 
was curiously called his theology seemed very super- 
ficial to the thoroughgoing, and aroused what, still 
more curiously, the Editor of his " Letters " has felt 
justified in calling "some just criticisms." Why 
"just"? one is tempted to ask at the present day 
when nearly the whole thinking world, save that por- 
tion of it committed to the defence of dogma, has prac- 
tically, if insensibly, come to adopt his view that the 
sanction of religion is its natural truth. And that the 
natural truth of religion has not lost its hold on the 
non-clerical thinking world along with its traditionary 
"confessions" and their philosophy, is due primarily 
to the spirit that distinguishes between what is and 
what is not vital in the matter. This spirit inspires 
much religious writing at the present day. But 
Arnold's religious writing does more than assay the 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

alloy of popular Christianity. It advocates, commends, 
exalts the pure metal, points out its worth and its win- 
ningness, shows how important a part it plays in the 
development and discipline of one's highest self, elo- 
quently magnifies mankind's legitimate concern in it, 
and convincingly establishes its claims and its rewards. 
Nothing is more singular than the reticence with 
which religion is treated even by the religious. The 
sense of its being a private, an intimate and a sacred 
concern hardly accounts for it. It is true it is a mat- 
ter of the heart, and about matters of the heart one is 
instinctively reserved. Then, too, the dread of seeming 
hypocrisy undoubtedly acts as a restraint. But that 
one of the greatest forces in the moral world should, 
merely as a subject of thought and speculation, receive 
only what may be called professional and esoteric 
attention is not thus to be explained. Theology is 
freely considered and discussed, increasingly less so, of 
course, as its sanctions come generally to seem insub- 
stantial and as, in consequence, it loses interest. Yet 
dogma is at best limited and disputed formulary, 
whereas the principles with which it deals or misdeals 
are universal. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, 
is a disputed and unverifiable dogma. The influence 
of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is 
a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that 
of electro-magnetism. But, the pulpit of course aside, 
the dogma has certainly occupied a more prominent 
place in the minds of men than the fact. The compar- 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ative lack of interest in the more interesting theme is, 
one would say, inexplicable. Every one knows that, if 
he would, he could at once determine with his entire 
nature to " depart from iniquity," that he could, if he 
would, successfully accomplish this, and that the result 
would be the happiness, so far as happiness depends 
upon one's self, of which every one is in search — " the 
peace," in a word, " which passeth all understanding." 
Man's capability of utilizing this force is a matter of 
consciousness, and the effect of doing so is as demon- 
strably certain as the effect of combustion. It is diffi- 
cult to see why it is not phenomenally as interesting. 
It is surely quite as important, quite as deserving the 
attention of the critic, quite as dignified and fruitful a 
secular theme. And in spite of this, in spite of its 
interest and its universality, it is relegated to the 
theologians. 

The explanation doubtless is that, owing to various 
causes — the cathedral infallibility of the Church and 
the tyranny of Protestant "Biblism," for instance — 
theology and religion, dogma and natural truth, have 
been so closely and so long associated as to have be- 
come amalgamated. The natural history of dogma 
explains its despotism. The instinctive or empirical 
perception of truth out of which it is developed is lost 
sight of in the philosophic form it assumes in final defi- 
nition. Its devotees come to feel, for example, that, to 
use Arnold's phrase, " salvation is attached to a right 
knowledge of the Godhead." On the other hand, those 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

minds on whom it loses its hold as its form gradually 
discloses its emptiness, forget its origin. Any formula- 
tion of the constitution of the " Godhead " seeming 
absurd when withdrawn from the sphere of logic and 
brought into that of consciousness, God Himself — 
whom, as Joubert says, it is " not hard to know if one 
does not force one's self to define Him " — is left out 
of all consideration. Dogma comes to seem, thus, an 
invention instead of a development, and, to crude 
minds, an interested invention. Nor is it crudity alone 
that thus misconceives it. The " liberal " temper itself, 
exasperated at its perversions, wars against its bases 
often. Heine speaks of " the fictitious quarrel which 
Christianity has cooked up between the body and the 
soul," as if St. Paul's antagonism between " the law of 
the members " and " the law of the mind " were not a 
matter of universal experience. Of the two tendencies, 
however, there can be no doubt which is in accord with 
the Zeit-Geist at the present time. It is dogma that 
has lost its hold on serious minds, and Arnold's great 
concern in his religious writings is to save religion from 
going with it. 

He was himself of a deeply religious nature, and his 
religion was, of course, as any religiousness must be at 
the present day, actively Christian. People speak of 
Epictetus and of Marcus Aurelius as if there were 
something religious in paganism essentially extraneous 
to Christianity — as if born in later times within the 
fold of Christianity they would not, dogma aside, have 

180 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

been as formally Christian as Melanchthon or Sir Thomas 
More. Had the " Discourses " been uttered in the 
thirteenth century Jesus would certainly have replaced 
Hercules in the passage in which Epictetus calls Her- 
cules " the Son of God." Other people, who accept the 
fairy tale of popular religion as the only basis, and 
metaphysical theology as the only definition of Chris- 
tianity, like the London " Spectator," accuse Arnold of 
being essentially an atheist — "just as," says Arnold, 
in " God and the Bible," " the heathen populace of Asia 
cried out against Poly carp : 'Away with the Atheists' " 
His own idea of the essence of Christianity he defines, 
in " St. Paul and Protestantism," as " something not 
very far, at any rate, from this : Grace and peace by 
the annulment of our ordinary self through the mild- 
ness and sweet reasonableness of Christ." This was 
the Christianity he sought to extricate from the desue- 
tude into which both its mythology and its metaphysics 
have indubitably fallen. To any one who feels with 
him that religion is " the most lovable of things," no 
attempt could be more attractive or more important, be 
more properly a work of serious literature. He him- 
self considered " Literature and Dogma " his most 
important work. 

It is in the first place a constructive attempt. In 
the words of its secondary title it is " an essay toward 
a better apprehension of the Bible," and it was con- 
ceived and executed in the interests of the preservation 
of religion. To this end, it perforce exposed the in- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

substantiality of the current misapprehension of the 
Bible — the proof from prophecy, the proof from mir- 
acles, and that from metaphysics. Many readers prob- 
ably got no further than these luminous chapters, 
which, it is true, were written with a zest calculated 
to arouse the scepticism of the suspicious. The attack 
on metaphysics was certainly the least successful of 
this ground- clearing work. It was continued in " God 
and the Bible " and elaborated to a degree which may 
fairly be said to betray a consciousness of not having 
exactly hit off the matter. It was a depreciation in 
deference to his own predilections, which were literary 
and religious and not scientific, of what a whole order 
of serious minds rest their firmest convictions upon. 
In his treatment of the supernatural he professed to 
part from miracles with regret, from metaphysical 
proof with pleasure. There was something a little 
Olympian in this. As he says, miracles do not and 
never did happen. Metaphysics is at least a pseudo- 
science which can only be attacked in detail and only 
through its own terms, just as universal doubt is a self- 
contradictory affirmation. Nothing can be more salu- 
tary, nevertheless, for the many minds whose vice is 
content with abstractions, than his — extremely meta- 
physical and perhaps not too scientifically successful — 
attack on the fundamental concept of "being." It 
does not convince, but it cannot fail to enlighten. No 
vivacity, it is true, can obscure the fact that it is pure 
caricature to say : " Descartes could look out of his 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

window at Amsterdam, and see a public place filled 
with men and women, and say to himself that he had 
no right to be certain they were men and women, be- 
cause they might after all be mere lay figures dressed 
up in hats and cloaks." But after all it is to be borne 
in mind that the metaphysical proof of a religious 
system is, like those from prophecy and miracles, 
merely a part of its apologetics and not of its appeal. 

It is its appeal, its constructive side, that, as I say, 
constitutes the essential part of " Literature and Dog- 
ma." Its cardinal proposition is that the Bible is liter- 
ature and not dogma, and that so to consider it is the 
preliminary to a right and adequate estimate of it. 
Having contended for an absolute divorce between 
religion and theology in the interests of essential Chris- 
tianity, he proceeds by treating the Bible as literature 
to draw out in a positive way its natural, real and 
verifiable value as a religious document. No com- 
mentator on the Scriptures has ever accomplished a 
more cogent and seductive work than his showing of 
the use to which the truly religious soul may put the 
book of which it is a commonplace that it is the Book 
of Books, but which readers who have come to dis- 
credit the dogma based upon its misapprehension have 
come completely to neglect. But aside from this 
specific service in emphasizing the value as literature, 
as poetry, as criticism of life, of the Bible, his religious 
writings are also a rational and eloquent exposition of 
the attractiveness of religion itself. He made religion 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

a theme, a topic, of literature. He brought out its 
general interest and rescued it from the hands of the 
specialist. He treated it as properly a branch of cul- 
ture. He awakened in his serious readers inclined to 
regard it as negligible a certain dissatisfaction and 
sense of incompleteness. 

Even in detail his services to religion are consider- 
able. To take a single instance: No idea of modern 
times has been more fruitful, in the sense of forwarding 
the true, that is to say the spiritual, interests of re- 
ligion than his favorite one that the sole justification 
of separatism is moral and not doctrinal. Nothing has 
more successfully warred against " the communion of 
the saints " than the contrary opinion, which may be 
said to be native to Protestantism. The Eeformation 
— "the real Eeformation, the German Eeformation, 
Luther's Eeformation," as he calls it — was, in his 
words, " a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense 
against the carnal and pagan sense " ; it was " a relig- 
ious revival like St. Francis's." The Christian Church, 
he says, is founded " not on a correct speculative knowl- 
edge of the ideas of Paul, but on the much surer ground : 
' Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart 
from iniquity ' ; and holding this to be so, we might 
change the current strain of doctrinal theology from 
one end to the other, without, on that account, setting 
up any new church or bringing in any new religion." 
His appreciation of the religious value of unity is no 
doubt largely due to his traditional feelings for the 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Church of England and his traditional antagonism to 
Nonconformity. " The Evangelicals," he says, " have 
not added to their first error of holding this unsound 
body of opinions the second error of separating for 
them." Of course his preoccupation with the Church 
and the Nonconformists in his illustrations and argu- 
mentation limits his public. It is all rather aliunde to 
Americans, for example, even to American Churchmen. 
But it is easy for any reflecting reader to understand 
his meaning in saying, for example, " Man worships 
best in common ; he philosophizes best alone." And it 
is not difficult to seize the significance of his central 
idea that mere doctrinal dififerences do not justify a 
dissolution of that union in which there is strength as 
much in religious as in other matters with which man's 
moral nature is mainly concerned — patriotism, for ex- 
ample, or the feeling for the life of the family. 



VI 

The virtue of all his criticism — literary, social and 
religious — is revealed, not to say enhanced, by the 
limpidity of his style. It is perhaps a matter of per- 
sonal feeling, but it seems to me that limpidity at least 
suggests, if it does not express, a shade of more positive 
quahty than is conveyed by clearness. At any rate in 
noting the limpidity of Arnold's style what I have in 
mind is the medium rather than the directness of his 
expression. We know very well nowadays what is 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

ordinarily meant by clearness of style. It is a quality 
that we owe to the natural and one might almost say 
the involuntary evolution accompanying the effort to 
express ideas constantly growing in complexity and 
increasingly involved in their relations and suggestions. 
Mr. Spencer's famous style is, as it were, a weapon 
developed out of the necessities of the case. Style like 
his, which is currently not very uncommon, is the per- 
fection of what is called "good EngHsh"— an instru- 
ment enabling the writer to convey his thought to the 
reader without losing any of its energy on the way. It 
is the opposite of such a style as Mr. Pater contrived 
for himself, in which, as Mr. Max Beerbohm observes, 
he treated English " as a dead language." Its charac- 
teristic, however, is, equally with clearness, lack of 
color. In this respect it may almost be called the off- 
hand style — it is so summary, so careless of perfection 
of any kind save that of adequate expression, so con- 
temptuous of anything like persuasion, so superior to 
ornament, so disdainful of emotion. It is the style 
with which in polemics one defies the reader to deny 
and makes no effort otherwise to convince ; and it is 
singular how it tends to polemics, how little literature 
has been written in it. 

On the other hand, there is the clearness of Thack- 
eray, of whom Carlyle says : " I suppose no one in our 
day wrote with such perfection of style." Thackeray's 
clearness is notably marked by color, but it is color 
taken from the writer's personality, and except for its 

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MATTHEW AKNOLD 

supreme quality of taste, seems the means rather than 
the medium of his expression — no doubt the finest 
effect producible by prose. Arnold's clearness, on the 
contrary, is felt as an element of technic, and has that 
quality of density which pleases as a property of a pal- 
pable medium. It is pellucid, limpid. One notes it 
as he does a certain clarity of tone in a painter's technic, 
a certain explicitness of modelling in a sculptor's touch. 
It has the air of being not so much instinctive as 
arrived at. A great deal is done with it. It is elabo- 
rately limpid, one may say. It has a tincture of virtu- 
osity. He plays with it beautifully, bringing out into 
relief certain shadings and subduing certain others in 
contrasting lower-toned transparencies — as a pianist 
of distinction not only interprets his composer but 
exhibits his instrument at the same time. In a word, 
he makes his lucidity count aesthetically. At times he 
grows over-fond of it, as is the inherent danger of all 
exploitation, especially the sincerest ; at times it shows 
excess and runs into a mannerism of iteration at which 
in another Arnold himself would be the first to wince. 
The four times repeated " Scotch drink, Scotch religion, 
and Scotch manners," within the limits of a single para- 
graph of his consideration of Burns, is " hard to read 
without a cry of pain," as he said of a distich of 
Macaulay. Less formally the remorselessly renewed 
appearances of "the Bishops of Winchester and 
Gloucester '* in the beginning of " Literature and 
Dogma" are irritating intrusions. These and similar 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

instances are examples of explicitness run to seed. 
But they are the defect of a quality, and due to an 
excess of a dilettante spirit of playfulness to which we 
owe very much that is acutely charming in Arnold's 
writings. They are not inherent in his style at its 
best. At its best in this respect of limpidity a page of 
his — a page of " Literature and Dogma " itself — reads 
like a page of the " Apology," in its elaborate and elevated 
Socratic clearness. 

To this quality thus aesthetically "handled" he 
adds an equally positive and sensible beauty of diction. 
It is not the beautiful liquid flow, rhythmic, cadenced 
and prolonged, of Newman's. But if less sinuous it 
has more strength; it has greater poise and an apter 
precision. Compared, too, with the beauty of such 
prose as Ruskin's, it has a certain savor of soundness, 
a sense of conscious subscription to what Euskin him- 
self, speaking of Venetian architecture, calls " the iron 
laws of beauty" — that is to say, subscription to the 
proprieties of prose, without yielding to the solicita- 
tions of the spirit of poetry which outside its own 
domain is sure to be irresponsible and indiscreet. 
There are, for example, many " passages " in Arnold's 
writing memorable for their beauty. Every one 
remembers the apostrophe to Oxford. The close of the 
essay on Falkland, the description of the Greek poetry 
of imaginative reason in the essay on "Pagan and 
Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," the sentences of the 
essay on Keats: "'I think,' said Keats, humbly, 'I 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

shall be among the English poets after my death.' He 
is. He is with Shakespeare," are other examples of 
sobriety surcharged with feeling exquisitely character- 
istic of the grave discretion proper to the province of 
prose, mindful of its limits as well as conscious of its 
capabilities. And they and others like them are beau- 
tiful, as prose poetry is not, for the very reason that 
they are so 6xplicably founded in fitness. But his 
diction in general is noteworthy for the same quality. 
It is penetrated with the sentiment of the significance 
it expresses and never self-hypnotizes. It is too 
significant to be " musical," but its straightforwardness 
is very sensitively organized. Its obvious elegance is 
not the elegance of detachment, but is elegance 
leavened with personal feeling — now pushed by per- 
sonal feeling to the point of piquancy, now restrained 
within the confines of mere suggestion, but informed 
by it always. 

And for the same reason it is never polished into 
insipidity. Always full of intention, it is never style 
for its own sake. One feels that the writer is partial 
to his style, that he models it consciously and is per- 
fectly aware of it as an element of effectiveness, but it 
is the dress of too much virility to absorb and pre- 
occupy, however much it may interest, him. It is 
careful but it is genuine, high-bred but vigorous, 
studied but simple, considered but considered as form 
merely. Its urbanity is at times a trifle express — 
especially in controversy — but it is urbanity associated 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

with too much point ever to be mistaken for appro- 
bativeness. It is obviously the style of a writer who 
adds to their lustre in maintaining the traditions. 
" Suckled on Latin and weaned on Greek," some one 
asserted of Dr. Arnold's children, and the classic strain 
is naturally distinguishable enough in Matthew 
Arnold's style — in its stuff as well as in its syntax. 
But it is not in the least academic — it is too modern, 
too flexible, too much the offspring of English parent- 
age. Its vocabulary is less remarkable for range than 
for felicity ; in felicity it is as remarkable as Tenny- 
son's ; indeed with equal aptness — equal justesse — its 
felicity is even more marked than Tennyson's, because 
it is more instinctive, and instinctiveness is a con- 
stituent of felicity. Neither is felicity confined to his 
vocabulary. His phrases are famous. 

This combination of limpidity, beauty and culture, 
consciously co-operating in the production of an ex- 
plicit medium, exploited rather than dissembled, has 
for its notablest result perhaps the circumstance that 
Arnold's style is, as style, the most interesting of any 
of the writers of our day. I say as style, because 
though I think Thackeray's surpasses it in interest, it 
does so in virtue of the inimitable color of a more 
interesting and omnipresent personality. Thackeray's 
apart, at all events, there is no other that in respect of 
interest approaches Arnold's if we take his writings in 
the mass. His writings taken in the mass gain im- 
mensely from their style. Interesting as his substance 

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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

is, it would be distinctly less so but for the art of its 
presentation. One has only to think of any of his 
books written otherwise to feel at once that it would 
be less captivating. By interest, of course, I mean the 
feeling that is stimulated by what is admirable, interest 
within lines of laudability, an artistic interest, in a 
word — not the thrill aroused by dithyramb, or eccen- 
tricity, or picturesqueness, or any of the various forms 
of rhetoric which often create an effect whose intensity 
is altogether disproportionate to its duration. In any 
theme of Arnold's one is interested in how he takes it, 
how it is conceived, exhibited, enforced, in the way in 
which its own intrinsic interest is unfolded, in the 
adaptation itself of the means to the end. It is not 
" the grand style." As he says,- the grand style is to 
be found only in poetry, and to my sense he is not a 
great poet. But he has the style, if not of a great 
writer, at least of an admirable, a unique, literary 
artist. 

VII 

It is frequently and truly remarked of Arnold's 
poetry that it never can be popular. But this is not 
because there is anything particularly esoteric about 
it, and the assumption that it appeals particularly to 
the elect is largely unfounded. It is, at all events, 
better than that. It is not in any exclusive sense that 
Mr. Lang and Mr. Augustine Birrell find it intimately 
consoling. Others enjoy it in the same way, though, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

of course, whether or no in the same degree it would be 
impossible to determine. But it is poetry that never 
can be popular because it appeals to moods that are 
infrequent. It is intimately consoling if you are in a 
mood that needs consolation, and consolation of a 
severely stoic strain. Otherwise it is not. Now, most 
people are either rarely in such a mood, or, when they 
are, demand consolation that stimulates instead of 
stifling their self-pity. The poetry, like the music, that 
intensifies one's mood is inevitably more popular than 
that which contradicts it. And, of course, the stoical 
mood being far rarer than the sensuous, sensuous poetry 
will always be surer of a welcome than stoical. It 
makes a slighter demand on the faculties, and whatever 
requires effort is proportionally unwelcome. " Stanzas 
written in dejection near Naples," or near anywhere 
else, please us, because savoring them involves no ten- 
sion. A passionate lyric of Byron or a plaintive one 
of Keats finds us much more readily responsive than 
Arnold's austere verses on " Self-dependence," which 
invoke an energy that in most men is at best inter- 
mittent. For this reason his plaintive, or, if one 
chooses, his pessimistic, strain, is more moving to most 
readers than his stimulant and inspiring note. The 
lines beginning : " Strew on her roses, roses," in spite 
of their rather tame conclusion, the intimately pathetic 
quatrain beginning : " What renders vain their deep 
desire," the first part of " Rugby Chapel," with its 
deepening shadows and enshrouding gloom, will always 

192 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

be favorites over those of his poems that celebrate the 
activities of the will. Yet the latter are the more 
numerous and by far the more characteristic. 

I do not mean to assert that the militant mood is 
less prevalent to-day than the purely receptive one, so 
far as regards the appreciation of poetry. Verse like 
Scott's " One crowded hour of glorious strife/' would 
awaken the same thrill, perhaps, as ever, if there were 
any of it. Browning's popularity is, indeed, probably 
growing. But this is a mood to which Arnold never 
appeals. His poetry is in the mass addressed to the 
mood of moral elevation, and it would be fatuity to con- 
tend that this is a frequent frame of mind. For the 
most part we come to the reading of poetry in an un- 
moral mood. We respond to the aesthetic appeal a 
thousand times more readily than to the moral. How 
many readers would agree with Arnold in preferring 
the " Ode to Duty " to that on the " Intimations of 
Immortality " ? His argument is unimpeachable. The 
former is sound, the latter fantastic. But are we often 
in a mood to be as thrilled by the lines, 

" Kor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face," 

as we are by the images and cadences of the certainly 
more popular poem ? There are certainly times in 
which simply to be good seems the one thing worth 
striving for to, no doubt, the worst of us. There are 
moments when the will welcomes the mastery of virtue 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

and solicits fusion with the good in absolute self- 
surrender — moments when the heart is touched with 
fire from the altar of rectitude, and the sweetness and 
joy of being at one with the most vital principle in the 
universe flood the soul with balm. It is the ideal, not 
of poetry, but of religion, however, to multiply such 
moments and render permanent this transitory condi- 
tion. And though, as Arnold says, " the best part of 
religion is its unconscious poetry," its unconscious religion 
is but a small part of poetry, speaking comparatively, 
and in Arnold's poetry there is nothing unconscious at 
all. It is extremely express; and, although to say so 
is not to deny that it is genuine, its genuineness takes 
a clearly calculated form. It must dispense with the 
aid of that unconscious religion which animates Words- 
worth, even when he is doctoral and dogmatic. His 
popular appeal is, therefore, still more limited than 
Wordsworth's because his inspiration, though morally 
elevated, like Wordsworth's, is restricted within the 
confines of intellectual intention and lacks the self- 
abandonment to transfigured impulse which Wordsworth 
eminently shows to be as much within the province of 
morally elevated poetry as of any other. It lacks exal- 
tation. Moreover, it lacks the exultant quality which 
Arnold himself signalizes as Wordsworth's true great- 
ness — " the joy ofifered to us in nature, the joy offered 
to us in the simple primary affections and duties." It 
is never joyous ; joyousness is the one quality above all 
others which it never has. 

194 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

On its aesthetic side, too, its reliances are few. In 
the mass it is unmusical — at least in the sense of being 
independent of music as a reliance. It is absurd to 
find it cacophonous, as is sometimes asserted, and to 
maintain that its author had no ear — though, perhaps, 
had his ear been more sensitive he would not have cited 
Keats's " peaceful citadel " as " quiet citadel." There 
are metres which he handled with instinctive felicity — 
witness "Heine's Grave," " Eugby Chapel," "A For- 
saken Merman." But they are not, so to say, musical 
metres. His repugnance to balladry, his recoil from 
sing-song, his partisanship for the hexameter, are sig- 
nificant. His feeling for the slower vibrations of 
rhythm in the citations he holds up as models almost 
indicates a preference for intonation to song. Quoting 
Gray's statement that " the style he aimed at was ex- 
treme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous 
and musical," he says that Gray is " alone or almost 
alone (for Collins has something of the like merit) in 
his age." Compare with this the celebration of Collins 
by Mr. Swinburne, who is a master of music in poetry, 
whose verse is often music et prceterea nihil : " There 
was but one man in the time of Collins who had in him 
a note of pure lyric song, a pulse of inborn music irre- 
sistible and indubitable ; and that he was that man he 
could not open his lips without giving positive and 
instant proof. The Muse gave birth to ColHns; she 
did but give suck to Gray." An examination of Arnold's 
poetry would show many musical lines, sometimes a 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

happy note like a sudden bird call, a thrilling dactyl, a 
tetrasyllable of liquid cadence enforced by appositeness 
recalling Keats himself. But at the same time these 
are elbowed by awkwardnesses of scansion, eccentricities 
of ictus, and now and then a positive cessation of lyric 
tone as though in obedience to the rubric " spoken." 

Poetic quality, too, is sometimes as lacking as musi- 
cal. The two are certainly to be distinguished, and 
Arnold's verse is far more rarely unpoetic than it is 
unmusical. But of course poetry that has not a musi- 
cal interpretation falls just so far short of being poet- 
ically perfect. Dispensing with the reliance of rhyth- 
mic felicity it is necessarily thrown back more or less 
boldly on the unaided poetic value of its substance, 
and a formal rather than magical expression of it. 
Aside from this so far as its lack of poetic quality is to 
be felt as a shortcoming in Arnold's poetry, it is due, 
I think, to the fact that his pursuit of the Muse is a 
shade systematic. The turn for criticism, which is an 
integral part of his genius, gives it a theoretic tincture, 
at the least. He thought a great deal about poetry, 
about what it should be, what line it should take, what 
inspiration the poets of the future should seek. No 
one has written more acutely or more fruitfully about 
it. But at the same time it, perhaps naturally, fol- 
lowed that when he came himself to illustrate his 
principles he was preoccupied with their application in 
a degree that modified his possession by his theme. 
He was conscious of his art instead of absorbed in his 

196 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

subject, with the natural result now and then of polish- 
ing his poetry into prose instead of "letting it model 
itself," as a painter would say, under the guidance of 
his tact. 

In the suggestive " Prefaces " to the first and sec- 
ond editions of his poems, he lays down a number of 
poetical requirements with the utmost penetration. 
Among others he emphasizes " the all-importance of 
the choice of a subject," and he indicates what in a 
general way that choice should be. Nothing could be 
better. But practically the consequence of a poet's 
specific reflection upon the choice of a subject is not 
such a work as the " Antigone," or any of the Greek 
models Mr. Arnold is recommending. It is not such a 
poem as "In Memoriam," or, to take a crucial in- 
stance, " The King and the Book." It is such a poem 
as " Sohrab and Eustum." " Sohrab and Eustum " is 
a beautiful and, at the climax, a moving poem. But 
as a whole it has a fatal lack of spontaneity. The 
choice of the subject has been too carefully made and 
the treatment is too theoretic. It is not personal and 
romantic enough. Its romance and individuality of 
treatment are too tranquilly contained within the 
limits of the form, and the form is an exotic. It is 
not that it is artificial. Tennyson is artificial. But 
Tennyson can be personal without ceasing to be even 
conventional. His artificiality is a natural expression. 
He is not hampered by his significance, which he 
handles in high differentiation as easily as if it were 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

even less significant than — owing to its universal 
acceptance — it often is. A poet, however, who is first 
of all a thinker, needs to give his feeling a freer rein 
and, whatever his theories about poetry in general, 
forget their application in his specific effort for ade- 
quately poetic statement. 

Arnold's poetry is, at all events, penetrated with 
thought, and this forms its true distinction. It is in- 
deed the fulness of its significance that embarrasses its 
expression both in musical and in more subtly poetic 
form. Of course, had his genius possessed either what 
he himself calls the " natural magic " of the Celt or the 
"Greek radiance" it would have carried his thought 
more easily. But it is a reflective and philosophic 
genius, and accordingly its sincerest poetical expression 
savors a little of statement rather than of song. And 
to endue statement with poetic quality a more inevi- 
table and exclusive poetic vocation than his is requisite. 
He does, it is true, suffuse it with feeling, but with 
feeling whose pertinence and poise are perhaps a little 
too prominently irreproachable. " Genius is mainly an 
affair of energy, and poetry is mainly ^n affair of ge- 
nius," he says very truly, and it is, in the last analysis, 
probably energy that his poetry lacks to give it greater 
currency and greater charm. Around greater energy 
his numbers would crystallize in more eloquent, more 
moving combination. They would have more buoy- 
ancy, more freedom, a larger sweep, a more sustained 
flight. For this reason the narrative and dramatic 

198 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

poems have less attraction than the elegiac and lyric, 
and for this reason even the lyric poems are contem- 
plative rather than impassioned. It would hardly be 
amiss to call some of his verse cogent. 

But, as I say, its penetration with significance forms 
its true distinction, and if his energy is insufficient to 
rank him in poetic quality with the "born poets" of 
his calibre, nevertheless the quality of his thought 
estabhshes such a balance in his poetic gifts and ac- 
quirements that his poetry, taken as a whole, gives 
him an honorable and a unique place in their company. 
It is not fatuity that makes him say that " with less 
poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual 
vigor and abundance than Browning " his poetry has 
"perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of 
them." And it has the great advantage of being, so 
far as its characteristic quality of thought is concerned, 
admirably representative of the combined thought and 
feeling of the era. Our generation probably atones 
somewhat for feeling less simply, less strenuously than 
the last, by attuning its feeling more closely to its 
thinking; and perhaps the next will witness such 
interest in new complications of thinking, born of in- 
creased multifariousness of phenomena for its exercise, 
that feeling will become still less agitated and inde- 
pendent than it is to-day. 

And of feeling that is legitimated by the tribunal 
of reason, Arnold is the poet ^ar excellence. His at- 
tempts to illustrate the theories of his " Prefaces " may 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

be in form too conscious, too much an echo of the 
models he holds up, but in feeling his poetry is in the 
main the personal expression of a poet who is genu- 
inely a follower and not an imitator of the poets of 
that " century in Greek life," to quote his own words 
" — the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from 
about the year 530 to the year 430 B.C. — in which 
poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most suc- 
cessful efifort she has yet made as the priestess of the 
imaginative reason, of the element by which the mod- 
ern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live." 
His inspiration is certainly what he calls " the imagi- 
native reason," neither " the senses and the understand- 
ing" by which he says the poetry of later paganism 
lived, nor " the heart and the imagination " of the 
poetry of mediaeval Christianity. One may say that 
his reason a little overbalances his imagination, but it 
is certainly true that his imagination in the very cir- 
cumstance of being thus solidly sustained not only 
avoids the weakness of insubstantiality, but operates 
positively with increased eloquence and elasticity be- 
cause it is the servant only of that reason whose ser- 
vice is perfect freedom. An elementary is as good as 
a recondite illustration. Take, for example, the way 
in which such a theme as immortality is treated by a 
poet purely of the heart, like Whittier, in the lines : 

" Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust 
(Since He who knows our need is just) 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must." 
200 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

The lines are true poetry, and, taken with their context, 
they are touching ; no one with memories can be unre- 
sponsive to them. But they are no longer convincing, 
because their basis is insubstantial. Compare with 
them this stanza of Arnold's from "Kugby Chapel," 
and its context : 

" O strong soul, by what shore 
Tarriest thou now ? For that force, 
Surely, has not been left vain ! 
Somewhere, surely, afar. 
In the sounding labor-house vast 
Of being, is practised that strength, 
Zealous, beneficent, firm." 

Here we are in the world of reason. We are still 
among assumptions, no doubt, but we have exchanged 
pure sentiment for poetic speculation, and a conven- 
tional for an imaginative treatment. Arnold goes on : 

" Yes, in some far-shining sphere. 
Conscious or not of the past, — " 

He will be betrayed into no claim, in the region of 
the unverifiable, which reason would not, in recognizing 
its own limits, acquiesce in as properly within the 
jurisdiction of the imagination. Thus the reader of 
Arnold's poetry never has to say to himself : " But it 
is not true ! " And to the sense of our own day this is 
fundamental in poetry as elsewhere. 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

And not only does his poetry satisfy because it is 
sound without being conventional, but truth is posi- 
tively its inspiration as well as its guide. It is truth 
that stirs his imagination. It is the divination of some 
broad or subtle verity of the soul, seized by his delicate 
apprehension, that suggests its poetic inference to his 
imagination, sets it aglow with light and sufifuses it 
with elevated feeling. The experience of the soul amid 
the phenomena among which in our complicated era it 
passes its existence — its moments of gloom, of aspira- 
tion, its disillusions, its yearning sadness, its sense of 
the heavy burden of clairvoyance, and the withdrawal 
of old solaces and supports, its wistful glances into the 
penumbra of the verifiable, and its tragic certitude of 
seeing, in the sphere of attainment, the ideal decline 
in compromise — these and similar phases of the spirit- 
ual life of our time have found expression in Arnold's 
poetry as they have nowhere else. And their expression 
has been not only true, but truly imaginative. He 
was quite right. He occupies a place by himself. He 
inhabits the serene uplands of poetic thought, where 
the mind and the soul receive, at least at intervals, a 
stimulant sustenance, however rarefied the atmosphere 
may seem to the quite otherwise exigent demands of 
that aesthetic sense whose activity is less intermittent. 



202 



RTJSKIN 



EUSKIN 



EusKiN left his interesting "Autobiography" unfin- 
ished, but otherwise his life-work was substantially 
complete long ago ; the main interest of the " Autobi- 
ography," in fact, is that it is a discursive commentary 
on this life-work already rounded and already a public 
possession. He was born in 1819, the son of a rich 
wine merchant, and was graduated at Christ Church 
College, Oxford, at the age of twenty, receiving the 
Newdigate prize for poetry. It is a great pity in many 
ways that he did not accept this good fortune as an 
omen, and consecrate himself thenceforth to the service 
of the Muses. He was certainly a born poet, but he 
abandoned poetry for prose at his graduation, and 
never seriously returned to it. He was soon heard 
from in a work published anonymously as by "An Ox- 
ford Graduate," and destined to become speedily famous, 
first for its style, and second for its ideas. The style 
was absolutely novel ; it was in an exceptional degree 
"the man"; it was the prose of a true poet, and at 
once took rank as the first of that product of unre- 
strained genius known as "prose poetry." The ideas 
were equally novel. They were subversive of accepted 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

commonplaces, fanatically professed articles of a new 
faith, and characterized by an ingrained contentious- 
ness. All Euskin is in the " Modern Painters," which, 
as every one knows, was an eloquent and fervid glorifi- 
cation of landscape and of the superior way in which it 
had been painted by certain English painters of the 
present era, notably Turner — mirabile dictu, who sys- 
tematically violated every article of the Euskin creed — 
compared with its insufficient treatment by the old 
masters. The five volumes of this surprising work 
revolutionized English feeling on the subject with 
which they dealt. It may safely be asserted that no 
writer ever "made" a man as Euskin did Turner. 
Plato did less for Socrates. 

From that time on every work of the new author 
was greeted with applause and read with avidity. His 
activity branched out into a dozen different directions. 
His publications were on the most discordant subjects. 
Church government and discipline, political economy, 
the complexities of modern life, as well as nature and 
fine art, were discussed by him with equal ardor and 
authoritative tone. To say he was equally at home upon 
them all would be to claim a universality and compre- 
hensiveness of mind which he not only certainly did 
not possess, but, contrariwise, most conspicuously lacked. 
But he endued them all with a very nearly even interest 
by his strenuous personality, his extraordinary intensity. 
The record and critique of these works comprise the 
history of his life, which was otherwise uneventful. 

206 



RUSKIN 

The interest of his " Autobiography " is purely subjec- 
tive — too much so for so elaborate a work ; no man's 
spiritual development can be so valuable to others as the 
scale of the " Autobiography " implies. 

He was early married, but allowed his wife to obtain 
a divorce from him in order to marry the painter with 
whom she had fallen in love, whose work also he began 
forthwith to eulogize with his customary eloquence. 
The incident illustrates his intensity and lack of poise ; 
in the pursuit of saintliness, measure had no interest 
for him. So far as material circumstances are con- 
cerned, he ordered his life as he would. With his 
genius, his tastes and his equipment, what he might 
have made of it is imaginatively quite as impressive as 
what he did. He inherited great wealth ; his literary 
gains were among the greatest of modern times ; he 
accumulated great treasures : and he died poor, having 
dissipated his whole substance designedly in the service 
and for the benefit of his fellow-men. To note the 
quixotism of his benevolence would be ungracious, were 
it not so strikingly the counterpart of the quixotism of 
his mind as to mark the singleness of his nature. His 
unselfishness was as notable as his self-will. He jpayait 
de sapersonne ; he gave everything, himself included — a 
procedure that, if not in every respect exemplary, is at 
any rate too exceptional to excite the uneasiness of 
even the wise and prudent. It is not, however, the 
way either to influence one's future fellow-men or to 
raise to one's self a literary monument jperennius cere, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

He was twice elected Slade Professor of Poetry at Ox- 
ford. He founded the St. George Society — a kind 
of community in which, in accordance with his views 
of private life and political economy, human nature 
was to be ennobled by manual labor and eschewing 
manufactured articles. One wonders if he had ever 
read " The Blithedale Eomance." He took a great 
interest in workingmen, and for several years published 
a journal for them with the edifying title " Fors Cla- 
vigera." Much of his life was passed on the Continent, 
where he made long and elaborate examinations of the 
monuments of plastic art there. Of his works, besides 
" Modern Painters," the most celebrated and the most 
useful are the results of his travel and residence in 
Italy and France. " The Seven Lamps of Architecture " 
and "The Stones of Venice," with the "Modern 
Painters," probably comprise all of his product that will 
last through the epoch of indifference to much that the 
present age has delighted in, which we can readily per- 
ceive to be already upon us. Beautiful fragments, bits 
of real literature such as are worthily called gems — 
" The Ethics of the Dust," for instance, and " Sesame 
and Lilies" — will undoubtedly pass into the literary 
limbo of the future because of their lack of substance. 
As Carlyle said long ago, " everything not made of 
asbestos is going to be burned." There is, even in a 
purely literary sense, exceedingly little " asbestos " to 
be found in the sum of Mr. Buskin's works. 



208 



EUSKIN 



II 



It is not, indeed, hazardous to venture the prophecy 
that posterity will find his writings lacking in form as 
to style, and lacking in substance as to matter. He 
was to an extraordinary degree a pure sentimentalist, 
and there are many signs that the day of the pure 
sentimentalists is over. He was not, in fact, of his 
own time. He made a great impress upon it, it is true. 
He not only revolutionized the state of feeling in 
regard to fine art in England, did wonders both for 
the awakening of the humdrum, the matter-of-fact and 
the philistine element of English society to the vital 
truth and real beauty of art, and against the conven- 
tionality theretofore accepted as artistic beauty and 
truth — he made a very deep moral impression upon 
many serious minds, who still regard him (such is the 
chaotic condition of our culture) as an evangelist 
rather than as a mere writer upon fine art. This is 
the way in which he wished to be regarded; and he 
expressly regrets having wasted so much force upon 
sesthetics which he might else have devoted to morals 
and politics. 

But his success in all these regards was, as we can 
now see, due to special causes, and consequently ephem- 
eral. He was of his time only in representing the 
reactionary feeling common to all epochs. He was, as 
it were, flung off by one of those occasional excesses of 
the centrifugal motion of a period. To the weary he 

209 



VICTORIAN PEOSE MASTERS 

was consoling; he soothed the despondent; he grate- 
fully flattered the disgusted, the unsuccessful, those 
who felt themselves out of harmony with the way the 
world was going. There are always such persons, and 
consolation for them is always developed, and in this 
sense Euskin's message to them may be called a 
natural evolution, especially as they were particularly 
numerous and particularly in need of consolation at the 
beginning of our industrial era. But representative of 
the best spirit, of the courage and the faith of his time, 
Kuskin certainly was not. There is more of this to 
be found in Byron — where, indeed, there is a great deal 
of it to be found, by the way. 

The best spirit, the faith and courage of this or any 
other time, must be interpreted from a standpoint that 
recognizes and does not flout its unalterable conditions. 
In any other position one does but beat the air. There 
is more stimulus in Carlyle's single epithet " Captains 
of Industry" than in all Euskin. The most elemen- 
tary utility would dictate on the one hand the rational- 
ization of the optimism which prevailed perhaps more 
widely in Euskin's day than at present, and on the 
other the winnowing of the chafif of decadence from 
the grain of potential germination that certainly never 
existed in such profusion as it does to-day. The means 
by which "joy" is "in widest commonalty spread" 
were never so numerous or so efficient. The develop- 
ment of the social unit has never reached so high a 
point, and the possible achievements of social co-opera- 

210 



RUSKIN 

tion have never seemed so nearly attainable. Erudition 
was never carried so far nor education so broadly dis- 
seminated. Faith was never so completely divorced 
from superstition nor morals so nearly automatic. 
Well-being was never so nearly universal nor opportu- 
nity so opulently abundant. And — what is not suffi- 
ciently borne in mind — criticism has for the first time 
become a powerful controlling, constructive and cor- 
rective force. In a word, the "note" of the time is 
expansion, development, exercise of one's faculties. 
With the material side of this we are all familiar, of 
course. Its spiritual side has since Goethe been 
marked by a turning toward mind rather than toward 
sentiment. The higher reaches henceforth are found 
unsatisfactory if they are pervaded merely or chiefly 
by emotion. In this sense Euskin is altogether medi- 
aeval. 

Now nineteenth-century medisevalism is not only a 
paradox, but the next thing to an impossibility. In- 
deed — although if obliged to sum up in one word what 
seems to me the vice of Euskin's gospel, I should say 
its medisevahsm — such is the perverse irony of the 
nature of things that Euskin himself is lacking in cer- 
tain of the most important characteristics of the medi- 
aeval spirit — simplicity and humility, for instance. 
There are most assuredly traits of medisevalism that 
are of perennial value — vide Carlyle's " Past and Pres- 
ent," passim. But to preach them successfully one 
must be not merely fanatical, but simple ; not merely 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

eloquent, but persuasive. "Carlyle and I only are 
left," observed Euskin once. The association is absurd. 
It reminds one of the association sometimes made of 
Carlyle and Coleridge, with whom Euskin had a far 
greater affinity. It has been brilliantly remarked of 
Coleridge that he "had no morals," and in the same 
way Euskin can be said to have had convictions only 
by extension. He was absurdly mercurial, which 
means of course that his convictions did not really 
convince him. Terribly self-conscious in everything 
else, he was perfectly unconscious in his ignorance of 
this. He was, no doubt, thoroughly sincere in fancy- 
ing his intensity of emotion a mark of reality of con- 
viction, which, as an analytic age has discovered, it is 
very far from being. His passion for formulating his 
paradoxes, organizing his whimsies, making a credo of 
his fancies, for demonstrating, proselyting, disputing, 
illustrating his general principles by specific examples, 
fortifying his positions by proofs, and so on — in short, 
the predominance of the polemic element in his works 
— indicates how superficial is his mediae valism itself in 
everything but intensity of unmixed emotion. The 
one essential resemblance between him and St. Francis 
is his exaltation. Fancy St. Francis as the founder of 
the St. George Society ! He undoubtedly made many 
people see the side by which St. Francis is superior to 
Theocritus, but it may be said that any one nowadays 
who is especially grateful for such a service is likely 
to receive more harm than good from it. St. Francis 

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KUSKIN 

himself has irrevocably gone by. Eehabilitated by 
Ruskin, he becomes not only grotesque but injurious, 
because we only get the sentimental side of him, and 
the future is clearly not to sentimentalism. 



Ill 

To this predominance of the emotional sense over 
the thinking power is undoubtedly due the didacti- 
cism which is the prominent strain in all his writings. 
It appears by no means exclusively in his practical 
preachments. It pervades his writing on art as well. 
And it is not necessary to subscribe to the doctrine of 
" art for art's sake " in order to justify one's dissatisfac- 
tion with it. This maxim has a temperamental rather 
than an intellectual appeal and can therefore be end- 
lessly and profitlessly debated. On the one hand, one 
is tempted to adjure its opponents to consider art, if 
not for its own sake, then for the sake of anything they 
choose, but not while ostensibly occupying themselves 
with it to be really concerned about something else. 
On the other hand, one feels like asking its partisans to 
consider the claims of reason as well as of beauty, since 
indeed beauty is but reason expressed in form, and to 
remember that the mind has its aesthetic needs as well 
as the senses. Art is not altogether an esoteric or arti- 
ficial affair, cut off from man's legitimate and absorbing 
moral preoccupation and handed over to the keeping of 
a caste composed of votaries of the pleasures of the 

213 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

senses. No one can stand on the Athenian iicropolis 
or in the Medici Chapel, or walk through the Vatican 
Stanze, without feeling himself in the presence of an 
epitome of a whole civilization's moral quality. The 
impression one receives is ultimately a moral impres- 
sion. The sentiment awakened is a moral sentiment. 
Sentiment, indeed, means moral sentiment ; it is impos- 
sible to feel unmorally. The mere terminology we 
apply to the aesthetic elements of form and color — 
such epithets as noble, elevated, trivial, serious, de- 
based — are the counters of moral values. Considered 
in the most practical way, considered in its concrete 
phases of plasticity — those phases that preoccupied 
Kuskin — art has its universal relations. 

These relations, however, real and important as they 
are, are dictated by its character. They are quite dis- 
tinct from those of the tract or the sermon or the 
celebration of the 104th Psalm. And to this vital 
circumstance Euskin never gave the least heed. To 
treat art as he treated it is to twist it out of the direc- 
tion plainly indicated by its own inherent tendency, to 
divert it from the true channel between it and the uni- 
versal moral ideal of man's motive and aspiration, to 
snap the native ties that bind it to its own supreme 
justification of moral significance — to deny, in effect, 
that it as well as other " modes of motion " has its own 
legitimate and particular province as an expression of 
the soul. The sanctions of art are undoubtedly ulti- 
mately moral. But so are the sanctions of everything 

214 



RUSKIN 

else — everything of any real significance. And didac- 
tically to merge art in ethics, instead of considering it 
as an individual element of man's general moral activity, 
is as puerile as it would be thus to merge philosophy. 
It is notoriously the vice of the characteristic English 
treatment of art that it does this. His English environ- 
ment does a great deal to impose it on any writer. 
But Euskin — aside from the fact that nothing was 
ever extraneously imposed upon his wilfulness — met 
the expectations of his environment, one may say, very 
much more than half-way. Indeed, the extravagance 
with which he illustrated this point of view, reducing it 
practically ad absurdum, is probably accountable for 
the almost complete decline in his once prodigious 
influence. 

His illustration of the specifically moral theory of 
art, however, did not spring from an inadequate phi- 
losophy of the subject. The work of no such incon- 
testable and spontaneous genius as his ever perhaps 
springs from an inadequate philosophy. It has a clear 
temperamental genesis. Temperamentally he was all 
of a piece — as his abundant self-contradictions elo- 
quently testify. No writer was ever more so. And 
his temperament was that of unalloyed didacticism. 
So that he not only celebrates the didactic element in 
art, the element that can be used didactically, at least 
— often by twisting it out of the intention of the artist 
and seeing purpose in what is mere presentation ; he 
takes it universally as a text from which to preach, 

215 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

himself. He is always preaching. He has the tone of 
the conventicle. He is never content with stating, 
explaining and fortifying his ideas. He is persistently 
engaged in imposing them. His attitude is always the 
attitude of superiority, that of the teacher to the pupil. 
He instructs inveterately. He can hardly say the sim- 
plest thing without commending it to the reader as a 
rule of action or avoidance, something to be especially 
pondered, to cherish, to shun, to doubt, to believe, or 
what not. 

When he abandoned art altogether, as except for 
occasional recurrences to it he did with " Unto this 
Last," he was at least more completely in his native 
element. The futility of his social and economic preach- 
ing — which was certainly conspicuous — in no wise 
compromises the harmoniousness of his consecration 
to it with his native tastes and capacities. As he 
says himself : " These writings of mine, so far as they 
are essays upon art, have been often interrupted — 
and even warped and broken perhaps — by digres- 
sions respecting certain social questions in which I 
have always had an interest tenfold greater than I 
have in the matters I have been driven into undertak- 
ing." On these questions sciolism is perhaps not less 
objectionable than it is in sesthetic writing, but they 
have a legitimate philanthropic side that better justifies 
his didactic bent. Here, at all events, it comes out in 
all its energy, and some of his admirers find here his 
truer justification as a " prophet." Yet enjoyment of the 

216 



RUSKIN 

prophetic strain unsupported by sound substance must 
always seem a little singular to any but a rococo or a 
rude taste, one would say. Culture is perhaps a little 
intolerant of didacticism in any case, but it may ex- 
cusably be easily surfeited by the frenzy of didacticism 
divorced from its utility. And the prophets from whom 
Euskin got his tone would, we may be sure, have 
adopted a different one with a modern and occidental 
public, all questions even of the difference between his 
and their " messages " aside. One would like to know 
how his employment in the discussion of art and 
economics of all the rhetorical apparatus that he bor- 
rowed from them, his abuse of "the words 'Providence* 
and ' He,' " as Thoreau says, all the " Biblism," in short, 
which forms so large a part of his rhetorical stock in 
trade and gives a subtly factitious cogency to his ex- 
travagances, would strike such a pious sense as that of 
the judicious Hooker, for example. In much the same 
way, probably, that it does the sestheticians and econo- 
mists themselves — namely, as an arrogant and irre- 
sponsible mixing of genres in defiance of innate de- 
corum. 

IV 

His writing on art, at all events, his didacticism 
distorts in the first place, and vitiates in the second. 
It distorts it by giving it the false sanction of moral 
purpose, of utility. • In a large sense, as I have said, 
art certainly has this sanction, and no other, like every 

217 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

department of human efifort. In the only sense, how- 
ever, in which this is not a truism, it is false; and 
a detailed consideration of art in this view results in 
distortion. It is nothing against the "Perseus" of 
Florence that Benvenuto was a rascal; it is nothing 
in favor of the absurd embryonic sculpture on St. 
Mark's that the artisan was a reverent and pious 
worker belonging to the " ages of faith." Purely emo- 
tional treatment of fine art is vitiated treatment, be- 
cause it upsets all real distinctions and all relative 
values. A thousand instances of this in Euskin crowd 
one's memory. In fact, it is to be said in all soberness 
that they make up the body of his art writing outside 
of its rhapsody. Complete surrender to emotion, 
which is, of course, the source of whim and fanaticism, 
has resulted, in Mr. Euskin's case, in a body of criti- 
cism most of which is never seen by competent critics 
without either exasperation or disdain. It never sings 
the praises of restraint, of severity, of the Greek ele- 
ment in art. It loses the form in the significance, and 
the significance it as often as not supplies itself. It 
not only exalts sentiment in altogether undue degree, 
and depreciates pure expression, but the sentiment 
which unfailingly it admires is sentiment of a particu- 
larly primitive nature. It becomes ecstatic to puerility 
over a crude Giotto forgery in Santa Maria Novella, 
for example (vide " Mornings in Florence "), and is un- 
moved by the ineffable spirituality of Eaphael's inex- 
haustible expression. It shows the delight of a savage 

218 



RUSKIN 

in the presence of the positive colors simply combined, 
and remains cold before subtle harmonies of value. 
It extols " the precision and perfection of the instanta- 
neous line " as the acme of painting, and finds Titian's 
" Presentation " a cheap composition. 

The truth is, he was quite disoriented in writing 
about art at all. He neither recognized its limitations, 
nor acquiesced in its office, nor apprehended its distinc- 
tion. He did not like it. He was, which is quite 
another thing, in love with nature. All the art he 
cared for was what is sometimes called imitative art, 
and his measure of this was the amount of unadulterated 
nature it contained. For constructive and composed 
beauty he had no feeling. He thought it blasphemous. 
He shrank instinctively from everything architectonic. 
Art, in the sense of nature plus the artist's alembic, 
absolutely disquieted and perturbed him. He had his 
own alembic — and certainly one whose magic is its 
own justification often. But what an equipment for a 
writer — either philosophic or even poetic — on art! 
Art has its own sanctions, its own gospel, its own devo- 
tees. Mr. Euskin was of the opposite creed — one 
may say, in the opposite camp. A bit of botany in a 
painter's work was more to him than the loveliest gen- 
eralization. Partly his contention was the moral one 
that it showed more reverence, more fidelity, more 
humility. Let whoever will define these terms, which 
in this sense, at all events, are already obsolescent, even 
in English writing upon art. Their illogicality is 

219 



VICTOEIAN PROSE MASTERS 

apparent. The cathedral is as apt a place as a cave to 
worship in, and God is doubtless as immanent in the 
work of man as in inanimate nature. Eeduced to its 
lowest terms — and to absurdity — Euskin's contention 
would be that the soul is not His habitation. But the 
only way to absolve him from the charge of the loosest 
kind of thinking in his lucubrations on art is, avoiding 
confutation of his logic, to concentrate onfe's attention 
on his adoration of nature. 

Here, however, he was beyond all cavil superb. 
Has ever any one else done what he has here ? One is 
almost tempted into dithyramb in speaking of the way 
in which he has verbally crystallized his appreciations 
of the myriad aspects of that immense and immensely 
attractive energy of which, if Wordsworth is to be 
called the poet, Euskin himself is surely the oracle. 
He characterizes Wordsworth, somewhere, in his ludi- 
crously patronizing way, as in his best period " simply a 
Westmoreland peasant with the gift of melody." It is 
an absurd description of Wordsworth, but, mutatis 
mutandis, it might do for Euskin — one might say, if 
inspired by an analogous whimsicality. He lacked con- 
stitutionally, it is true, the simplicity of the peasant. 
He had not even the Tennysonian substitute of simplesse 
— to recall Arnold's happy distinction. No great 
writer was ever so perversely complicated. But in his 
view of nature, his absolute worship of her, he was 
mor.e than simple, he was naive. And his readers reap 
the benefit of this attitude in a long succession of lofty 

220 



RUSKIN 

and noble and moving and intimate disquisitions which 
not only elevate and charm but inform and instruct. 
He declares her mysteries with prophet-like authority, 
and seduces us into her arcanum with the most winning 
persuasions. None of her aspects escapes his affection- 
ately prolonged penetrative gaze, and he synthetizes 
them with an art that seems even to transcend the ob- 
servation on which it is based. His one distinction is 
to have been the most attentive, the most affectionate, 
the most eloquent, the most persuasive apostle of na- 
ture. But surely his preoccupation with art must be 
admitted to be perversity, and in his treatment of it 
any one who has as much delight in beauty as Euskin 
had, and who therefore needs no emotional stimulus, 
will find the same lack of substance as he who already 
believes in mediaeval virtues will in his more specific 
" criticism of life." 



Arnold somewhere relates that he once remarked 
to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider Lamartine a 
poet of much importance, and that Sainte-Beuve replied : 
" He was important to us." Euskin's real importance 
is of a similarly relative kind. He undoubtedly earned 
the reward of the evangelist, however little to do with 
any estimate of his work as literature such a distinction 
may have. He gave an immense impetus in his own coun- 
try and among ourselves to the popular interest in the 
whole subject of fine art. He raised its standard and 

221 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

beat the drum and clashed the cymbals about it with a 
vigor, a vehemence and a persistency that won thou- 
sands of recruits from the ranks of the phiUstines. 

In the first place, he discovered in it a great deal of 
neglected beauty. His study of its "original docu- 
ments " was, if not always profound, prodigiously pro- 
longed in many cases, as an ample fortune and complete 
leisure permitted. He was quite unhampered, often to 
the point of being uninstructed, by the consensus of 
other writing on the subject. To archaeologists he is 
occasionally as much of a sciolist as he is to political 
economists, though to the general laic appreciation his 
erudition seems a main element of his equipment. 
" Every one is not bound to know in what Gothic con- 
struction consists," said a pupil of Courajod to me once, 
speaking of Kuskin, " but I think a professor should." 
But he brought to the monuments and pictures that 
inspired him a fresh eye and a strenuous and individual 
temperament. For many people he practically discov- 
ered the primitifs, and by merely imagining himself 
— often no doubt quite erroneously — at their point of 
view, said many truly and searchingly interpretative 
things about them out of sheer force of sympathy. 
About Giotto, for a conspicuous example. The very 
predominance of the emotional over the intellectual side 
in him led him to feel the sentiment so inadequately 
expressed in technical respects. His temperamental 
depreciation of Ghirlandajo's manifest merit, for ex- 
ample, exactly prepares him for perceiving the feeling 

222 



RUSKIN 

inherent in many an awkward, incompetent and un- 
beautiful piece of workmanship. Of course in many 
cases he had to praise the workmanship, too. But 
meantime he had drawn attention to his favorites and 
got them at least considered. By dint merely of dis- 
covering " the most beautiful picture in the world " 
here and there, now the Bellini of the Frari, now the 
Carpaccio in the Museo Correr, as his preference 
changed, he stimulated popular interest in the less 
notable, but in a sense hardly more negligible, of the 
masters of painting. And similarly with a bit of mosaic 
in a certain church pavement, or a certain capital of a 
well-known palace, or a certain little figure of a cathe- 
dral faQade, and so on. In this way he led his readers 
to appreciate the wealth of historic art production as 
under more conventional, less fanciful, guidance they 
would have — indeed, had theretofore under such guid- 
ance — failed to do. 

In the second place, the generalizing character of 
his writing on art popularized the subject. He had a 
philosophy of it, bizarre as this might be. He talked 
infinitely about its principles, such as he curiously con- 
ceived them. There is an idea — or at least a notion, a 
crotchet — in all his utterances. His descriptions even 
are largely illustrative. Whatever he says has signifi- 
cance in the sense of dealing with meaning rather than 
exclusively with aspect. It is at least a text from 
which to preach and not left merely to itself. From 
the outset all his writing on art is full of " views," and 

223 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

to a large number of readers " views " are particularly 
interesting. Those of which he was so prodigal were, 
moreover, by no means exclusively on art, but on all 
sorts of more or less allied topics also. All of them 
had a strong ethical tinge, which was in itself a popular 
recommendation of the strongest kind. If this is what 
art is, many must have reflected, it is something serious 
after all, something really worth while. And very often 
they had the additional attractiveness of more or less 
novelty either in themselves or in their presentation. 
The chapter-titles alone of "Modern Painters" are 
eloquent witness of his disposition to take his sub- 
ject on large general lines, just as the mere nomencla- 
ture of his " seven lamps " announced a novel kind of 
ideal synthesis of architecture, however fanciful it 
might be. He was, in fact, captivatingly synthetic. All 
aesthetic phenomena of which he treated — and the de- 
tail of them is prodigious in number and multifarious- 
ness — grouped themselves readily in serried support of 
some central and unifying idea, some co-ordinating 
thesis, and took on the orderly aspect of an organism. 
There is an air of great system and explicit correlation 
in everything he wrote on art, and nothing better pre- 
pares the way for the reception of anything like a body 
of doctrine. 

VI 

Matching and supplementing the service rendered 
by Ruskin's writing on art to the Anglo-Saxon public 

224 



RUSKIN 

in general is that rendered by it to art itself — meaning 
mainly English painting. It certainly cannot be said 
that his writing on art drew the attention of English 
painters to nature. The sub-title of " Modern Painters " 
itself was, in the first edition, " Their Superiority in the 
Art of Landscape-painting to the Ancient Masters " — 
not only the superiority of Turner imprimis, but of 
many other English painters. But he did more than 
attract general attention to this contention. In doing 
this he also appreciably determined the course of 
English painting. Under his influence landscape-paint- 
ing greatly increased, and for a time, at least, it largely 
followed the lines he laid down for it. Captivated by 
his apotheosis of nature, English painting to a consider- 
able extent forswore its particular conventionalities and 
practised the precepts he preached. How much or how 
little he is to be credited — or charged — with the origi- 
nation of pre-Eaphaelitism as practised by the prominent 
elders of the sect has been much discussed, but it is 
unimportant beside the fact that he preached their 
gospel from the first, won them professional adherents, 
and greatly extended their influence and vogue. He 
furnished them with a philosophy, with followers and 
with a public. And the decline and disappearance of 
the cult does not obscure the fact that the predominance 
of the " note " of nature in English art ever since Eus- 
kin began his ministry is largely due to his eloquent 
insistence on it as the one thing needful for artistic 
salvation. The extreme literalness, flatness, and pov- 

225 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

erty as art of much English painting until long after 
Kuskin had turned his attention to other things, shows 
how influential was his gospel in freeing the average 
practitioner from the trammels and temptations of 
artistic conventionality and steeping him in a conven- 
tionality of its own — the conventionality of naturalis- 
tic imitation. But one may suspect that English art, 
as art, owes him more gratitude than resentment for 
determining its course in a direction which, however 
little it shines in it, is more consonant with its native 
aptitudes than are the artificialities from which he did 
much to rescue it. If its nature- worship under his 
tuition shows more in the transhteration, as one may 
say, than the translation of nature, it is at least an 
expression of a genuine and not an acquired bent. 



VII 

As to the lack of form in Euskin's style, there is 
likely to be far more dispute. Let it be said at once 
that his style is wonderfully eloquent. It has, more- 
over, one specific quality that mainly distinguishes it 
from the prose of any other writer : it has a peculiar 
beauty of cadence. It is true that its cadence is the 
element in it that most strongly suggests to a nice 
sense its falling short of the music of metre. And of 
course he abused it. Like his other qualities, it led 
directly and irresistibly to its corresponding defect. 
He took no artistic pleasure in its guidance and con- 

226 



KUSKIN 

trol, but delivered himself up to it with his usual lux- 
urious self-surrender. Yet it is the element of his 
prose which is not only most nearly unique, but also 
most serviceable to him. It sustains and gives char- 
acter to his periods, many of which run into passages 
too prolonged for the breath of even his most devoted 
admirers. In his hands it is beautifully differen- 
tiated. The cadence of Gibbon, of De Quincey, even of 
Jeremy Taylor, is a simple affair beside Euskin's, which 
in comparison possesses an infinite variety of notes and 
chords. It gives him a title to real greatness as a 
technician. It carries his excesses of assonance and 
alliteration — excesses which in his earlier writings he 
contemptuously stigmatizes, in his later, however, natu- 
rally recurring to them again. It is the native and 
spontaneous factor that purifies his " fine writing " and 
qualifies its artificiality. Through his cadence you feel 
that his meretriciousness has a kind of nodal substruc- 
ture of natural and genuine felicity. Take, for exam- 
ple, the following " pfirple patch " from one of his later 
deliverances. He is speaking of the dove, apropos of 
vivisection : 

And of these wings and this mind of hers this is what 
reverent science [one feels like interpolating " sic "] should 
teach you. First, with what parting of plume and what 
soft pressure and rhythmic beating of divided air she 
reaches that miraculous swiftness of undubious motion, com- 
pared with which the tempest is slow and the arrow uncer- 

227 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

tain; and, secondly, what clew there is, visible or conceiv- 
able to thought of man, by which to her living conscience 
and errorless pointing of magnetic soul her distant home is 
felt far beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through 
concealing clouds and over trackless lands, made plain to 
her desire and her duty by the finger of God. 

This, I think, is Buskin's prose at its best, and 
there is a great deal of substantially its quality in his 
writings. Its liquid recurrent cadences are varied and 
accumulated with the nicest instinctive art. It is not, 
to be sure, quite in the classic key. Horace, who ob- 
jected to the picrpicreus pannus even in poetry, we may 
be certain would not have greatly cared for it. If read 
aloud it beguiles the voice into a kind of chant and so 
is likely to please most the ear most easily satisfied 
with a substitute when song is suggested. And there- 
fore, since it is not quite " the real thing," the effect of 
it in the profusion in which we encounter it in Eus- 
kin's writings is the effect of surfeit. It makes excel- 
lent selections for the declamation of youth, and it has 
given many, many mature readers the greatest pleas- 
ure, and, since savoring it involves no tension, pleas- 
ure of a slightly oriental order. In a sense, indeed, 
it might be called voluptuous prose, were it not so 
often the garb of sentiments whose moral nature ren- 
ders it elevated as well as eloquent. And mainly its 
intoxicating quality Lies in its characteristic cadences, 
which, as I say, no. other writer has ever equalled. 

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RUSKIN 

And at times it carries one away with it ; you for- 
get any notions you may have about the essential 
characteristics of prose, or recall them only to feel 
yourself a pedant. It is when he is speaking of nature 
especially that this is true, as I have already implied — 
when " the waves of everlasting green roll silently into 
their long inlets under the shadows of the pines." You 
doubt if Wordsworth's poetry has surpassed such expres- 
sion of the power of nature over the emotions. But its 
first effect past, the old notions about prose recur, as 
they do after reading Jeremy Taylor or Elizabethan 
prose. You feel that there is something lacking, some 
element tending to repose, to sanity. Such a force as is 
applied by the reserve of poetic form, reducing to 
calmer movement and severer outline the tumultuous 
cadences in which Mr. Euskin's emotional genius riots, 
would be of advantage, perhaps, even in such a splen- 
did passage as that whose closing lines I last quoted. 
Even outbursts of impassioned eloquence, when they 
merely or mainly express emotion, gain in elevation 
and permanent charm through the element of artistic 
restraint. But there is no room for doubt that the 
positive need of this is "illustrated by the mass of Eus- 
kin's rhapsodical writing. His exuberance is very 
often absolutely savage and meaningless. It is pure 
feeling exhaled in the worst possible taste. Take, 
among a multitude of examples, the once admired pas- 
sage describing the piazza and church of St. Mark. It 
is perfectly unscrupulous in its rhetorical devices, and 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

thoroughly puerile in its cheap tropicality. Euskin 
would infallibly and correctly describe such a passage 
in another writer as "cockney." It is because his 
great defect is excess of emotion, and because emotion 
in one way or another is nearly his only source of 
strength, and because poetical form is almost sure to 
counteract excess, that English literature has perhaps 
lost from Ruskin's exclusive devotion to prose. To the 
preponderance of his emotional over his intellectual 
side, at all events, are justly attributable the two great 
defects which imperil his position as an English classic, 
namely, the lack of substance in his matter and the 
lack of form in his style. 



230 



GEOEGE MEEEDITH 



GEOEGE MEREDITH 



There are many traces in Mr. Meredith's novels of his 
sensitiveness to the popular neglect of them. There is 
no doubt of the neglect hitherto, though there are signs 
just at present of his increasing vogue. And he, at 
least, is too large-minded a writer to be consoled for 
the indifiference of the many by the devotion of a few. 
When one considers not merely the very considerable 
bulk of his contribution to fiction, but its extraordi- 
nary range and variety, and the absence in it anywhere 
of the element of preciosity or other littleness of the 
kind, the adhesion of " the elect " must seem a derisory 
mitigation of the sense of having missed the interest of 
the general. 

But such originality, as his — originality at any 
price — is to be achieved only at the cost of isolation. 
Note also that one instinctively speaks of it as an 
achievement rather than a native endowment. Were 
it altogether the gift of mother nature, its evolution 
could be traced and its relationships established. As 
it is, it has no genealogy. No writer ever pursued 
particularity so far; with the result that he stands 

233 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

quite apart from and unsupported by the literary fel- 
lowship which is a powerful agent in commending any 
writer to the attention of either the studious or the 
desultory. He cannot be placed. He_has no deriva- 
tion and no tendency. His works inhere in no larger 
category. He gains nothing from ancestry or associa- 
tion. He fills no lacune, supplements no incomplete- 
ness, supplants no predecessor. He is so wholly sui 
generis that neglect of him involves neglect of nothing 
else, implies no deficiency of taste, no literary limited- 
ness. Failure to appreciate him is no impeachment of 
one's catholicity. If he has a philosophy he is too 
original to let it be perceived ; if he has even a point 
of view he is too original to preserve it long enough 
for the reader to catch. The whole current of the 
literature of his day has flowed by him without appar- . 
ently awakening any impulse on his part to stem or 
accelerate it, without even attracting from him more 
than the interested glance of the spectator. His emi- 
nence is thus so extremely lonely as to tempt the pro- 
fane — whom he tempts a good deal — to wonder if it 
be not his loneliness that constitutes his eminence. 
His complaints of his lack of popularity seem to ignore 
this essential aloofness, which extends even to the ab- 
sence of any media of communication. So true is it 
that he makes no effort to win readers by providing 
even an atmosphere to be breathed in common for the 
time being, that it is a part of his persistent originality 
expressly to avoid this. To the sincere dilettante spirit, 

234 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

to do otherwise would perhaps seem a concession, a 
kind of solicitation, open to suspicion of tincture with 
vulgarity. Eesults follow causes, however, here as 
elsewhere, and if Mr. Meredith has been so explicitly 
to take or to leave, it is not so very surprising that he 
has been so largely left. 

Few of those he has won have a very definite ac- 
count to give of the reasons for their adhesion. Hardly 
any of them have been at the pains to set these forth, 
at all events. From which one may legitimately infer, 
I think, that their enthusiasm is largely constitutional 
rather than rational. They are, perhaps, constitution- 
ally drawn to originality as such and for its own sake. 
They exhibit the interest of the active-minded in phe- 
nomena that appeal less acutely to the distinctively 
educated. To the mass of representatively educated 
readers, Mr. Meredith's originality is disturbing. They 
are already interested in the things of the mind ; they 
are familiar enough with the riches of the classics to 
have in mind models that admeasure rather summarily 
wilful departure from them ; they are distrustful of the 
eccentric and inhospitable to novelty that controverts 
established canons. They care so much for literature 
as to care much less for anything so little like it. 
There is no conservatism more inveterate than the con- 
servatism of education ; none has more excuse for con- 
firmation in the emptiness of the radicalism which 
continually confronts and opposes it ; and none has so 
clear and so confident a repose in its own standards. 

235 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

Since the works of Mr. Meredith are so entirely sui 
generis as to constitute a class by themselves in contra- 
distinction and even antagonism to not some but all of 
the masterpieces they admire, and since moreover these 
works are difficult to read, educated conservatism is often 
disposed to trust to the pari de Pascal and take its 
chances. A good deal remains, after all, even if one 
loses something, is no doubt its reflection. 

On the other hand, the active-minded, who are 
traditionally unfettered, and in no wise disconcerted 
by contravention of the classic, instinctively welcome 
what no tyrannical standard bids them exclude. Not 
that they and the object of their worship in this case 
are sympathetically or even similarly constituted. Mr. 
Meredith is the incarnation of culture. He is educated 
to the point of extreme refinement. As Thackeray 
said of Macaulay, "he reads twenty books to write a 
sentence ; he travels a hundred miles to make one line 
of description." But the attraction of the candle of 
culture for the moth of irresponsible mental activity 
is a familiar phenomenon. And in Mr. Meredith's 
works, whatever the business in hand or however 
wretchedly it is proceeding, this luminary is always 
alight. Penetrating remarks about life, searching ob- 
servations on human character, proverbs, epigrams, 
aphorisms, saws, shine brilliantly or sputter, as the 
case may be, continually in its beams. The evidence 
that he knows what he is talking about is prodigiously 
voluminous. The circumstance that what he is talking 

236 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

about if large lacks concreteness and if small lacks 
relations, that in saying a number of specific things 
about things in general he is stimulating the apprecia- 
tive faculties rather than providing an object for their 
satisfaction, is less material. The less coherent and 
constructive culture is, the more clearly it appears as 
culture, as an end in itself rather than as a means to 
any end — such as the manufacture of masterpieces, for 
example. For a similar reason there is also to be found 
among Mr. Meredith's admirers that element of the lit- 
erary class which particularly savors technic as technic ; 
and his extreme cleverness, his variety and deftness of 
manipulation, so to speak, must be what wins for him 
the applause of such technicians as Mr. Henry James 
and Mr. Stevenson, though when Mr. Stevenson called 
him Shakespearian, he must have had his active imagi- 
nation also in mind. And there are doubtless many 
readers who " care more for thought than for art," as 
the preference has been expressed, and who share with 
such literary artificers as Mr. James and Mr. Stevenson 
a fondness for the raw material of art, provided it be of 
high quality, without pedantically demanding that too 
much be done with it. 

Neither the neglect nor the enthusiasm of which he 
is the object, however, helps to characterize Mr. Mere- 
dith's genius, save indirectly, and I have only referred 
to them in the endeavor to explain that they are natural 
and should not be suffered to prejudge his case. He is 
too large a figure to be obscured even by his own 

237 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

" originality," on the one hand, or, on the other, to be 
belittled by the extravagant admiration of " the elect." 
He has written many novels and not one that does not 
furnish brilliant evidence of remarkable powers. His 
poetry is a secondary affair altogether, whatever its 
value, and it is as a novelist that he ranks in the litera- 
ture of his time. And as a novelist it may be claimed 
and must be conceded that his position is not only 
unique, as I have said, but of very notable eminence. 
What other writer deserves to rank with Thackeray 
and George Eliot in the foremost files of Victorian fic- 
tion? — I do not mean for extraordinary genius, Like 
Dickens's, or for dramatic psychology, such as Mr. 
Hardy's, but for his " criticism of life." 
I- 

II 

The defect one feels most sensibly in Mr. Meredith's 
organization is his lack of temperament. It is this that 
extracts the savor from his originality. He has, if one 
chooses, the temperament of the dilettante. But the 
characteristic of the dilettante really is absence of tem- 
perament. Like its far less frequent but also far less 
indispensable analogue, genius, temperament is much 
more easily felt than defined. It is approximately to be 
described, however, as individuality of disposition quite 
apart from intellectual constitution, which nevertheless 
it influences, directs and at times even coerces. It is of 
the essence of the personal nature, of which the merely 

238 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

intellectual expression is, in comparison, an attribute. 
It supplies not only the color but the energy of any 
personal point of view or way of looking at things. It 
is the incalculable element in the human composition, 
the force through which the others fuse. It is through 
temperament that character organizes its traits into a 
central and coherent efficiency. Temperament, in a 
word, is energy accentuating personality. Original — 
and indubitable — as Mr. Meredith's genius is, his per- 
sonality is precisely what we never feel in it. It is not 
at all that he is what used to be called " objective " — 
that, like Shakespeare, he does not " abide our question." 
It is that he fails to excite it. He is detached, evasive, 
elusive, but he stimulates no curiosity. One may specu- 
late, it is true, though without zeal, as to the reason 
of his own interest in many of the phenomena that his 
books present. This interest is not only inferably but 
obviously very great, and it strikes one as singular con- 
sidering his monopoly of it on many occasions — for I 
suppose even the so-called Meredithian must fail to 
share it much of the time, however he may overdo the 
business as a rule. The answer is that it is the interest 
of the dilettante, too much absorbed in phenomena to 
think of himself contributing anything to their recom- 
bination in accordance with his own vision or volition 
— at most occupied with attributions and exposition. 

The dilettante is, it need hardly be said, an inde- 
pendent rather than an inferior type. Distinction is 
so marked and constant a quality of Mr. Meredith that 

239 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

to ascribe inferiority of any kind to him would be ludi- 
crous — except in so far as, for example, his particular 
order of critical implies an inferiority of constructive 
talent. He is the ideal dilettante in virtue of the com- 
pleteness and the catholicity of his devotion to the 
delectable. He finds it everywhere — everywhere, that 
is to say, where it exists in intellectual combination. 
And this, I think, gives him his extraordinary relief 
against his English environment, in which his temper 
and interests are rarely to be encountered. He has 
inexhaustible curiosity. What he calls "the human 
mechanism" attracts him distinctly as a mechanism. 
Within certain limits he explores its intricacies with 
wonderful ardor. He treats an eccentric type a little 
as if it were a new toy. The figure might be pushed 
still further: when he gets through with investigating 
it, it does not go quite as well as before he took it so 
completely to pieces. His analytic impulse is altogether 
out of proportion to his architectonic capacity. He is a 
critic dealing with the material of the artist. 

His books are curiously alike in interest, worth 
and meaning. And this singular equivalence testifies 
strongly to an equipoise undisturbed by anything so 
variable as temperament. Each has its thesis, and in its 
statement and demonstration the author evinces very 
nearly the same zest inspired by its fellows — that is to 
say, an intellectual interest in the working out of the 
thesis qua thesis. " Beauchamp's Career " is rather an 
exception. But this is because here his artistic thesis 

240 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

happens to include the setting forth of a general social 
and political one, in which he comes as near to taking 
a truly temperamental interest — to showing, I mean to 
say, a real personal feeling — as his systematic detach- 
ment ever permits. In " Beauchamp's Career " he does 
seem to betray a certain sympathy for man as man, for 
the democratic ideal. It is allowed to be divined and 
is quite objectively expressed in the main, through 
characters whose enthusiasm is impartially exhibited 
as excessive, and whose periods are pruned by corre- 
sponding Phocions of the opposite tendency. In ideal 
dilettante fashion the author, like victory, hovers over 
the combatants without alighting in either camp. The 
space he gives to the controversy and a shade of fervor 
in the statement of the "popular" side are the main 
evidences of his partiality. In " Evan Harrington " the 
scales are held with a blinder exactness on a truer level. 
Its theme — " Can a tailor be a gentleman ? " — is ex- 
quisitely adapted to the dilettante genius. It might 
seem insipid but for the fact that it is English and there- 
fore has tragic potentialities. Mr. Meredith gets a great 
deal out of it. Doing, I think, full justice to its grav- 
ity, he nevertheless finds its development full of zest. 
It gives edge to his satire, in which he is an adept, 
never being betrayed into the acerbity foreign to the 
true dilettante. It stimulates his sportiveness into the 
highest kind of high spirits a critic and a philosopher 
may properly indulge. And at times — as in the ab- 
surd public house scene between the absurd Cogglesby 

241 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

brothers — it declines into absurd farce without in the 
least losing its interest for him. 

Note that his detachment is not that of the artist. 
It is a detachment of spirit, not objectivity in treat- 
ment. He is often enough on the stage himself. His 
observations in propria persona are constant. He is 
never absorbed either in his subject or in its delinea- 
tion. On the contrary, he keeps it at arm's length 
when he is most interested in it, and speculates copi- 
ously about it. He gives the reader his impression of 
it — often pungent, generally prolix. His tongue sub- 
mits to no objective restraint in uttering the thoughts 
that arise in him regarding it. If these thoughts were 
sufficiently charged with feeling he would appear as a 
moralist or a sentimentalist, but as they have no par- 
ticular temperamental alloy, no purpose, it is less 
obvious that his attitude is not artistically, but only 
emotionally, detached. We are accustomed, in other 
words, to the artist whose presentation of his subject 
is supplemented by his personal commentary, but 
not to him whose commentary though constant is 
thoroughly impersonal. The latter is the case with 
Mr. Meredith ; and it constitutes no small part of his 
originality that even his essential aloofness should be 
no help to him in the artistic presentation of his sub- 
ject unconfused with talk about it. 

The artistic inappositeness of his commentary, on 
the other hand, is not relieved by personal feehng; 
it has no heart in it; it wearies as prolonged intel- 

242 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

lectual activity unmodified by feeling alone can weary. 
He turns his subject round and exhibits it as a 
collector does an interesting possession — a bit of 
cloisonne or a figurine. Except that he does so in 
large fashion, without pettiness or partisanship or other 
limitation, and that his " specimens " have indubitable 
significance, the parallel would be perfect. But in his 
large and penetrating way he lectures at great length 
on his finds. " The Egoist," for example, is essentially 
a dissertation — full of variety, it is true, and, truly, as 
its subtitle declares, "a comedy in narrative" as to 
form, but substantially not inaptly described as a dis- 
sertation. He even digresses whenever an allied topic 
solicits him. Nor need the alliance be a close one. 
The chapter on wine in " The Egoist " and that on ale 
in "Evan Harrington" are complete digressions — the 
former, especially, a remarkable tour deforce, but both 
clearly the exuberance of the connoisseur and in no 
wise details of an artistic composition. In an artist 
they would be effrontery. As it is they are excellent 
instances of the exercise of his prerogative by a dilet- 
tante in whose large and catholic and rather Olympian 
attitude towards art one cannot help fancying a slight 
tincture of disdain. 

Ill 

Mr. Meredith's world, however, is not a real world. 
It is a fantastic one treated realistically. It is not 
simple enough to be real ; he is not simple enough. It 

243 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

is so little representative that it lacks illusion. Any 
one who should base upon it his notion of the world 
of English society — society in the large sense, I mean 
— would get not only an incomplete but a distorted 
idea, though Mr. Meredith's world is as multifarious as 
it is populous. It is, like his genius, thoroughly sui 
generis, and it is peopled for the most part with figures 
of which the large or piquant conception is far more 
definite than the realization. Dickens's world, too, is 
sui generis. But it is everywhere intensely real and 
definite. You recall his characters vividly often with- 
out remembering in which books they occur. In the 
case of Mr. Meredith, you recall the books, not the 
characters. You never warm to his personages. You 
are not allowed to. He banters you out of it gen- 
erally ; even when such favorites of his own as Nevil 
Beauchamp are concerned, he is almost nervously tim- 
orous lest your tenderness should be unintelligent. 
This is carried so far that one rarely cares much what 
becomes of these personages. You know in advance 
that they will never be the sport of any spontaneity. 
Their fate is sealed. They are the slaves of their 
creator's will, counters in his game. And this is why, 
in playing it, though he constantly challenges our 
admiration, he does not hold our interest. The air of 
free agency that he throws around them does not 
deceive us. We don't at all know what is to befall 
them, how they are going to act, but we have an ever- 
present sense that he does, and this sense is only 

244 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

sharpened by the knowledge, born of experience in 
reading his books, that he is going to make them 
surprise us. The induction he would have us make 
is, no doubt, that they are unaccountable, like human 
nature itself ; but the one we make is that it is he who 
is unaccountable. 

There is one characteristic of his people that is 
given great relief. They are in general conceived and 
presented from the standpoint of what their creator is 
fond of calling "brain-stuff." But "brain-stuff" is 
easier to predicate than to portray. Every reader of 
"Diana of the Crossways" must have remarked that 
the heroine is declared to be of an intellectual brilliancy 
that is inadequately illustrated by her own manifesta- 
tions of the quality. Furthermore, "brain-stuff" is 
much more useful to rank people than to distinguish 
them. Brains as a trait are rather an anomaly. One 
person has more or less than another, but a markedly 
different order of them means eccentricity, or is at least 
apt to seem so in depiction. As to their natures, men 
are what they are through their feeling, not their think- 
ing, except in so far as their thinking influences their 
feeling. And their feeling is much more satisfactorily 
described directly than at one remove. 

This is one reason why many of Mr. Meredith's 
characters have the prime defect of not being always 
in character. He does not keep his eye on them. 
They do not command his undivided attention. En- 
grossed in their "brain-stuff," he has conceived them 

245 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

vividly, but he is not intimate enough with them, not 
subconsciously mindful enough of their identity. This 
is at least true of the leading personages who help 
him to pose and develop his theme, of which, on the 
other hand, he is unremittingly mindful. They are the 
theme's illustrations, and vary with the exigencies of 
its sinuous evolution out of the line of personal consis- 
tency. One feels that they are not the point. It is 
not merely that they are not differentiated in diction — 
that they all talk Meredith — except here and there 
minor characters that sometimes make one wish they 
did. This is true, and it is a great and obvious cause 
of the weakening of their individual definition, which 
is always greater at the outset than further along. 
The characters of many other authors, however, talk 
ahke, too. The circumstance is a convention, a con- 
cession to the necessity of exhibiting undramatically 
certain traits too delicate, too elusive, for literally char- 
acteristic vocabularies and habits of expression. Logic 
would often require dialect, which is mainly intoler- 
able. Compromise is imperative in any art, and one 
need not insist upon such vital characterizations in 
mere diction as Browning's, for example, which tri- 
umph so splendidly even over the inevitable blending 
of rhythm. But take such a notable instance as Mr. 
James, whose characters are often reproached with talk- 
ing James. The reproach, whether grave or trivial, is 
often just, but the main point is that they talk their 
own sentiments. Those of Mr. Meredith often do not. 

246 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

They are his mouthpieces; they say what he wishes 
said. The Princess Ottilia, for instance, in "Harry 
Richmond," is a charming creature, originally con- 
ceived and for a considerable period consistently car- 
ried out. Yet, wishing to make a series of observations 
about "life and the world," such as, "The world has 
accurate eyes but they are not very penetrating," he 
puts the shrewd reflections of philosophic maturity 
into the mouth of a young girl. Such instances 
abound in his novels. 

Naturally, furthermore, his psychology is a promi- 
nent constituent of his characterizations, but curiously 
enough it operates, at least as often as not, in the direc- 
tion of dissipating rather than defining their individ- 
uality. It is, in fact, nearly always a psychology of 
types, not of individuals. The contrary is, of course, 
usually the case with the psychological novelist, whose 
raison d'Stre may almost be said to be that for him 
types are conventions and therefore to be eschewed 
and replaced by individuals whose differentiation is 
psychologically achieved. Particularity of mental 
structure is his reliance for realistic illusion in his 
characters, as individuals contradistinguished from 
types. It would be paradoxical to assert that Mr. 
Meredith's characters are conventional. In the ordi- 
nary sense the epithet seems the one above all others 
which least fits his genius in any phase of its expres- 
sion. But though to the last degree unconvention- 
ally handled, and exhibited with a freedom that is 

247 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

license, an originality that is whimsical, they are 
nevertheless treated as types. They are simply un- 
conventional types — types either conceived by his 
wonderfully fertile fancy, such as Harry Eichmond's 
father, or generalized through his extraordinary pene- 
tration, such as Sir Willoughby Patterne. Yet, in 
spite of the wealth of psychological analysis that is 
expended on them, they are as representative, as illus- 
trative, as typical, in a word, as if his aversion to the 
traditional had not dictated their eccentricity. They 
acquire their high degree — their high dilution, one 
may almost say — of complication through being types 
of his manufacture ; for it is to be noted that they are 
not typical in virtue of correspondence to any natural 
analogue. They are in each case a conceivable con- 
geries of characteristics combined into ideal types by 
the genius of the philosophic critic. 

The result is that the illusion disappears — the 
character does not reach realization. It disintegrates 
into desultoriness. I do not myself recall a single char- 
acter in Mr. Meredith's populous world that does not 
lose in definition in his portrayal of its complexity. It 
is not merely because he has the idea instead of the 
image of it. That, to be sure, counts very largely. His 
absurd Countess in " Evan Harrington " may stand, in 
idea, as an analogue of Thackeray's Eebecca, whose 
memorable career was run before "psychology" was 
thought of as a necessary element of fiction. As an 
image the Countess is not visualized at all. But her 

248 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

definition is not only imperfect to begin with. The 
idea altogether eclipses the incarnation of it in the 
treatment she receives as well as in the author's con- 
ception of her. She is so much talked about by her 
creator, and her own conduct and talk and letters are 
so expressly calculated — so consecrated, indeed — to 
the exhibition of her character, her character is so ex- 
plicitly and unremittingly presented to our contempla- 
tion — we are so constantly and often so subtly reminded 
that she is not all bad, for example — that instead of 
seeming a real person she seems an idea generalized. 
She is a character psychologized into a type, instead of 
a type individualized by psychology. 

George Eliot's genius for generalization is, consider- 
ing its scope and its seriousness, certainly not inferior 
to Mr. Meredith's, but she is mistress of it, and though 
it limits the elasticity of her characters, it is never 
allowed to dilute their individuality. On the contrary, 
it intensifies it. Tito illustrates an idea as completely, 
as exclusively, as Mr. Meredith's Egoist does, for ex- 
ample ; but he incarnates it also. You get so much of 
the idea that you would be perhaps glad of a diversion, 
but it is because Tito himself is so interpenetrated with 
it that it is an idea active, moving and alive. Patterne 
is in comparison a symbol. Setting aside the fact that 
the whole question is begged by describing him as vastly 
more winning than he is shown to be, half his psychology 
is commentary, and before long the reader is admiring the 
penetration of the author into human character in gen- 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

eral, his detection of egoism under its multifarious dis- 
guises, the justice he renders the quahty even in exposing 
it, and so on. Tito, on the other hand, has the actual, 
almost palpable force of the traditional " awful ex- 
ample." As for Maggie TuUiver or any of George 
Eliot's notablest successes, none of Meredith's are at all 
in the same class with them any more than they are 
with Thackeray's. His discursiveness and his kind of 
discursiveness are fatal obstacles. Whatever may be 
said of the art of Thackeray's moralizing or of George 
Eliot's philosophizing, neither is discursive in the sense 
of diminishing the vitality of the characterizations it 
accompanies. Each serves the not unimportant pur- 
pose of enforcing the significance of the characters and 
situations. But when psychology in fiction ceases to 
particularize it becomes a pure excursus. It has its 
interest, no doubt, and indirectly may increase the 
typical quality of a character by showing how much it 
is like other characters. But even in this indirect way 
it manifestly loses rather than gains definition. With 
Mr. Meredith a character is, in this respect, often a mere 
point of departure. 

Each book is the elaboration of an idea, the working 
out of some theme taken on its intellectual side. 
Sometimes this is very specific, as in " Diana " or 
" Feverel," but it is always perfectly defined. The 
book is a series of deductions from it. Its essential 
unity therefore — spite of excrescent detail — is agree- 
ably unmistakable. But it is hardly necessary to 

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GEORGE MEREDITH 

point out that it is not the unity of a sympathetic 
image of life immediately beholden in its entirety. It 
is a mathematical, that is to say an artificial, unity. 
The plot, the personages, are not elements of an ensemble 
but proofs of a demonstration. And human life being 
for artistic purposes very little a matter of abstractions, 
being, in fact, uncontrollably concrete, it follows from 
this that his demonstration is in constant danger of 
being a pure tour de force. In effect Mr. Meredith's 
novels are primarily tours de force. At least, if some of 
them, such as " Beauchamp's Career," partially escape 
this danger, the most characteristic ones do not. To 
escape it requires too much cleverness, more even than 
Mr. Meredith possesses. Incidentally it may be cir- 
cumvented, and incidentally he is successful — notably 
in minor characters and situations. Some of his minor 
characters are not only delightful, but sound to the 
core — Sir Lukin Dunstane, Lady Eglett, the pious sea- 
captain in " Harry Eichmond," a dozen others, of 
which, however, candor compels the admission that they 
are the least original, altogether the most nearly con- 
ventional, of his creations. Some of his situations are 
extremely vital and truthful — the swimming scene in 
" Lord Ormont," the statue impersonation by Harry 
Eichmond's father, which is immensely comic, even 
grandiose — though as a rule they are either incidental, 
or at most mechanically contributory to the plot. The 
scene in " Harry Eichmond," which is the crux of the 
story, is, in spite of the splendid philippic of the Squire, 

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VICTORIAN PEOSE MASTERS 

a failure. The heroic mountebank breaks down com- 
pletely, " goes to pieces " not only in " nerve " but as a 
character of fiction. It may be said that thereby his 
human quality, underlying and excusing his extrava- 
gance, is shown. But a character that has first been in- 
flated into fantasticality as a tour de force is not built up 
into convincingness by collapse into credibility. It is 
simply destroyed. The hoUowness of the original con- 
ception is lamentably evident in the retrospect. The 
circumstance is typical and illustrates the failure in 
illusion of Mr. Meredith's art, due to the antagonism 
between his material and his purpose — the unfitness, 
in other words, of the data of human life to serve the 
purpose of theoretic demonstration. In this instance it 
is the effect of his tour de force that is sacrificed. Far 
more frequently and much more seriously the convinc- 
ingness of his picture of life is vitiated by a twisting 
of its elements into supports for his thesis. In general 
he achieves the aim of the tour de force. He attains 
plausibility. Everything is carefully thought out from 
the beginning. Details of no interest in themselves 
prove to have a bearing on the plot ; characters of no 
substance prove necessary pieces of the mosaic. Things 
incredible take place in order to make other things 
seem natural. One feels combining purpose every- 
where. Your doubts are foreseen, your objections fore- 
stalled. You are discomfited, not persuaded. And 
there is eminent, crying need of persuasion. The gen- 
eral effect is positively that of argumentation. 

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GEORGE MEREDITH 



IV 



There is one element of Mr. Meredith's originality 
that in no wise eludes analysis, and that is his perver- 
sity. It is omnipresent in his writings and always 
conspicuous. It is so intense that were his calm less 
Olympian, his self-possession less complacent, it would 
seem distinctly neuropathic. It is, however, a com- 
pletely integral characteristic, native to the constitu- 
tion of his mind, and never, I think, due to, or alloyed 
with, affectation or attitudinizing of any kind. His 
genius is quite free from pose. It is notable for a cer- 
tain largeness and independence quite incompatible 
with the approbativeness implied in affectation. His 
perversity is a natural bent toward the artificial. Its 
delight is in disappointing the reader's normal expecta- 
tions. Simplicity is its detestation. If the idea is 
simple, its statement is complicated. If it is particu- 
larly subtile, its expression is correspondingly succinct. 
A character, if unusual, receives a commonplace treat- 
ment, and if commonplace itself, is assigned some 
extravagance. If an incident is trivial, it is magnified 
into importance with a remarkable ingenuity or given 
an extraordinary satiric relief ; if it is truly dramatic, 
it is distinctly minimized. The author has apparently 
a definite dread of climaxes, which would seem instinc- 
tive if he were not here as elsewhere perfectly theoretic. 
His perversity is deliberately indulged, doubtless with 
some theory emulative and exaggerative of antique prac- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

tice, and modified into modernness by reflection on the 
undramatic unfolding of the real tragedies of life. 

The complexity of human nature, always a theme 
of the true novelist, is exhibited by Mr. Meredith with 
characteristic originality. You are shown the com- 
plexity, but so artificially that it ceases to be convinc- 
ing. Such a character as Diana Warwick, for example, 
the favorite probably of most Meredithians, is the 
result of an ambitious and elaborate attempt to create 
an embodiment of warring impulses, contradictory 
qualities, in picturesque but vital consistency — a char- 
acter, at least, whose definite personality successfully 
dominates its inconsistencies. It is a successful at- 
tempt only, I should fancy, to the sense of readers who 
forget a portion of the data in their vivid recollection 
of the rest. When Diana commits her extravagant 
offence, she really ceases to exist. Her personality is 
dissipated; she becomes another individual. Any de- 
bate as to whether she would have been likely to do 
such a thing is not even academic. It is merely in- 
quiring whether one kind of a person is likely to do 
something characteristic of a wholly different person. 
This may conceivably happen in life, but it is not char- 
acteristic of life, and therefore in art it has only the 
interest of a paradox, its representation being fatal to 
the integrity of the thing represented. The complexity 
of human nature is not what is shown. What is shown 
is the cleverness of the artist in shoring up into plausi- 
bility something inherently incredible. 

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GEORGE MEREDITH 

The most noteworthy example of this perversity is 
his one great tragedy, " The Ordeal of Eichard Feverel," 
his first and, in the view of his most thoroughgoing 
admirers, his greatest book. It is a marvel of artifici- 
ality imposed upon the reader as exactly the converse. 
It assumes to record the remorseless working of relent- 
less fate, and is in reality a remarkable piece of imagi- 
native ingenuity as little convincing as a tract. Its 
framework and premises are ingeniously unnatural, and 
it contains hardly a natural person, save the victims of 
the unnatural conduct of the others. The book is thus 
addressed directly to the nerves rather than to the 
mind or the heart, and in this respect is no more a 
book de tonne foy than the most painful of Maupas- 
sant's. The principle against which it offends is per- 
fectly plain. The element of fate in tragedy to be 
legitimate must be fatalistic. In " Feverel " one feels 
that it is absolutely facultative. Eichard's ordeal 
would dissolve into the simplest of idyls at several 
stages in the development of the story, if it were not 
for the author's wilful ingenuity, exercised to the end 
of making the reader writhe. Being so quintessen- 
tially artificial, it is extremely typical of the succession 
of novels which thus ominously it introduced. It con- 
tains some of the best writing, some of the most win- 
ning scenes, some of the truest poetry to be found in 
Mr. Meredith's writings. But a tragedy of which the 
reader resents the obviously voluntary predetermina- 
tion of the author to exact the utmost possible tribute 

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VICTOBIAN PROSE MASTERS 

of distress from him is not so much tragedy as melo- 
drama, and melodrama thoroughly sophisticated. Its 
psychology places it on a high plane for melodrama, but 
cannot disguise its character. And it is not difficult to 
see in the author's attitude toward his needlessly suf- 
fering characters the spirit which reveals Parrhasius, 
studying the contortions of his captive, as less a genu- 
ine artist than a dilettante a outrance. 

Perversity prevails in the treatment as well as in 
the substance of Mr. Meredith's fiction. There is no 
other instance of such technical wilfulness. Many 
readers are repelled by what they term the obscurity of 
his style. But his style is not obscure in the general 
sense of the word. He has a wonderful gift of expres- 
sion, and can not only say clearly the most recondite 
things, but give a recondite turn to things essentially 
quite commonplace. He does not love the obscure, 
but hates the apparent. He has that " horror of the 
obvious" so long ago as Longinus censured as hostile 
to the sublime. And as one cannot always avoid the 
obvious, especially if one is also extremely prolix, he does 
his best to obscure it. His vocabulary is never at a loss 
for a telling word when one is really called for. He 
can be crispness or curtness itself at need, often in- 
deed wonderfully vivid, sometimes within and some- 
times without and sometimes on the verge of the 
confines of taste, in his pursuit of vividness ; for ex- 
ample, "He read and his eyes became horny" — of 
Dacier's horror and amazement at the evidence of 

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GEOEGE MEEEDITH 

Diana's treachery. He makes few phrases that one 
remembers, however. He loads a phrase with meaning, 
but it is apt to be compression without pith, and often, 
in greater extension, it becomes rhetorical rather than 
pungent, though rhetoric that is never tinctured with 
insincerity. But where he cannot be telling, and even 
in cases where he might so easily be that he has an 
opportunity perversely to disappoint you by not being, 
he is exasperatingly evasive. 

His devotion to the tricksy spirit of Comedy led him 
early to emulate her elusiveness ; the interest in the 
game grew upon him, and his latest books are marked 
by the very mania of indirection and innuendo. It is 
not obscurity of style that makes it difficult to follow the 
will-o'-the-wisp of his genius disporting itself over, it 
must be confessed, the marshiest of territory often, but 
the actual chevaux-de-frise his ingenuity interposes be- 
tween his reader and his meaning. The obscurity lies 
in his whole presentation of his subject. He doles it 
out grudgingly, and endeavors to whip your interest by 
tantalizing your perceptions. The elaborate exordium 
of " Diana of the Crossways " should be read after read- 
ing the book. The prelude of " The Egoist " can be 
understood at all only as a postlude. The beginning of 
" Beauchamp's Career " is essentially a peroration, and 
in reading it how long is it before you discover that 
it is about the Crimean War you are reading ? If 
an incident is imminent he defers it ; if it is far in the 
future he puzzles you with adumbrative hints of it ; if 

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VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

it is likely lie masks its likelihood by presenting it fanci- 
fully ; if it is improbable he exhausts ingenuity in ren- 
dering it probable. It is impossible not to conceive the 
notion that he is enjoying himself at your expense, at 
least that he is the host having a good time at his own 
party. It is not an occasional but a frequent experience 
to find the key to, say, three pages of riddle on the 
fourth page. And this would not be so disconcerting 
as it is, were it not for the fact that the riddle of the 
first three is carefully dissembled under the deceitful 
aspect of something palpably preHminary ; so that until 
you come to the key you are not conscious of the exis- 
tence of the riddle and only wonder why you don't 
comprehend. The interest of the dilettante is universal 
and no doubt includes the pleasure of mystification. 
The effect produced is, however, not suspense, which 
has been a rehance of less original novelists, but dis- 
quiet. His motive is to keep you guessing. He only 
explains when you have given it up. In the end even 
the reader who enjoys guessing must lose interest. For 
other readers the dulness of long stretches of his books 
must be appalling. A great part of the art of fiction 
consists in making the filling of the grand construction 
interesting and significant. But this demands tempera- 
ment and Mr. Meredith has to depend upon artifice. 
And his artifice is mainly mystification. It is the 
coquetry of comedy, not its substance. 



258 



GEORGE MEREDITH 



Mr. Meredith has a charming essay on " Comedy 
and the Uses of the Comic Spirit," which discloses one 
of his ideals. He feels in English literature the lack of 
a Moliere. But for this lack his own genius might, 
one suspects, have taken a different turn. But for this 
sprightly essay, at all events, we should be more in the 
dark than we are in accounting for many of its manifesta- 
tions. It shows how complete is his devotion to the Comic 
Muse, how well he understands her, how jealous he is of 
her prerogatives and how he resents perversion of her 
principles. " Purely comic, addressed to the intellect," 
he says of one of his illustrations ; of another, " It is not 
the laughter of the mind." The useful secondary title 
of " The Egoist " is " A Comedy in Narrative." " Evan 
Harrington " is early called " our comedy." One needs 
the warning in order to perceive the point of view. 
It is at first thought singular that they are among the 
most prolix as they certainly are among the most 
characteristic of his books, but it is because in them 
his technic is most explicitly theoretic, most prede- 
termined by his parti pris. In them he gives him- 
self free rein, and having written " Comedy " at the 
head of his story indulges himself to the top of his 
bent. The " comedy in narrative," though for that 
reason perhaps it affords his talent, which is as wilful 
and undisciplined as it is vital, a congenial cadre, is a 
hybrid genre. The comedy is often death to the narra- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

tive. As a story Mr. Meredith's best book would be 
better for a closer resemblance to the ordinary respecta- 
ble novel — for which, indeed, at a certain point so far 
as the story is concerned, one would often willingly 
exchange it. The necessities of comedy, the irruption 
of new characters, their disappearance after they have 
done their turn, expectation balked by shifting situa- 
tions, the frequent postponement of the denouement 
when it particularly impends, and the alleviation of 
impatience by a succession of subordinate climaxes — 
all the machinery of the stage, in fact — impair the 
narrative. A novelist with a theoretic devotion to 
comedy inevitably drifts into the stage atmosphere, 
which is, of course, a convention, an obvious illusion, of 
which we do not exact, but to which we accord, con- 
cessions so that things may be presented at all. Except 
in " Harry Eichmond," Mr. Meredith simply never 
abandons himself to the current of romance. 

Nor is it the narrative alone that suffers ; the play is 
so much the thing that the characters are modified, often, 
in the direction of effective representation. The subtle- 
ties of the personages in " The Egoist," for example, are 
either broadened into types or twisted in slight metamor- 
phosis to meet the exigencies of the enormously clever 
plot and its veritably " Box-and-Cox "-like development. 
In " Evan Harrington " it takes even Mr. Meredith's 
cleverness to make plausible the improbable conduct 
which nevertheless a dozen times he has to assign to 
some of his actors in order to defer the denouement. 

260 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

Heroes do not die in the middle of their history, he 
exclaims reassuringly, when Evan meets with an acci- 
dent. No, one is tempted to reply, but it seems that 
they may whiffle like the chameleon to accommodate the 
action of a comedy. And when the spirit as well as 
the essential structure of the story is resolutely comic — 
keeping the ball constantly in the air — on the one 
hand the dramatic quality itself loses intensity, and, on 
the other, no cleverness can resist the siren- whispers of 
farce. Farce abounds in Mr. Meredith's novels, in 
spite of his frequently expressed disdain for it. It is 
simply the farce of whimsicality instead of that of 
grossness. And the tantalizing manner in which the 
dramatic is dissembled in " Evan Harrington " is typi- 
cal of the way in which in many other instances the 
reader's interest is allowed gradually to escape him, 
while he is serenely pursuing his consistently comic 
course. 

One effect of this predetermined comic treatment is 
the extremely unfortunate one of leaving the impres- 
sion of levity. Who can take seriously the prelude of 
" The Egoist," for example ? The author's fundamental 
seriousness must be admitted, but it is to be in- 
ferred from the gravity of his themes, and their often 
tragic development. In treatment it is frequently 
fatally compromised by the unrelieved persistency of 
the light touch. He is often enough heavy-handed, 
but always in the pursuit of deftness. He is elabo- 
rately, systematically, awkwardly airy. He is so in- 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

veterately theoretic that no detail of his theme swerves 
him from his addiction in treatment to "the extenu- 
ated style," as the old rhetoric called it. He is con- 
vinced that the substance should make its just impres- 
sion by its own weight; that any addition of energy 
in its presentation is surplusage ; that its presentation 
is merely illuminative ; that only a rude taste could 
call for any underscoring reassurance as to the ar- 
tist's own sympathies and earnestness. That is all 
to go without saying. One perceives that he is more 
civilized than civilization, and is tempted to ascribe 
the exaggeration of his extenuation, so to say, to an 
eccentricity born of his impatience with his English 
environment, culpably most lacking, no doubt, in pre- 
cisely this respect of the light touch. Perversity being 
a marked characteristic of his talent, he illustrates the 
other extreme. 

There is, as a matter of fact, throughout his books 
a patter of banter that is disconcerting, disquieting, and 
finally irritating. It is irony run to seed. It is so con- 
stant that it loses its reHef. It ceases to illuminate by 
setting the subject in an unaccustomed light, and often 
obscures it by its inappositeness. The reader loses the 
point of view. Irony to be appreciated must be felt as 
irony. One not only tires of too much of it, but grows 
uncertain of its character when the distinction between 
its statement and its significance, its real and its super- 
ficial meaning, ceases to be evident. The constant with- 
holding of the expected characterization, and the constant 

262 ' 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

substitution for it of one whose aptness depends upon 
the perception of the reader, require that the reader's 
powers of perception should not be fettered or exhausted. 
Mr. Meredith in the matter of irony, as in other phases 
of his ineradicable indirectness, flatters one's cleverness 
at first, but in the end he fatigues it. Apparently his 
aim is to circumvent it, and sooner or later he succeeds 
because, however much cleverness one may possess, one 
feels that one has other uses for it. Above all one 
resents the draft, the drain, upon one's confidence. We 
have to take the ironical author too much on trust. 

It is not merely the detachment so often, and so 
literally, recommended to the artist that he illustrates. 
He is not merely detached, he is obliterated. All he 
shows us of himself is his talent ; his standpoint is to be 
divined. And not only to be effective but to preserve 
its identity irony requires a standpoint that is obvious. 
We need to feel that it is not in earnest if it is to serve 
a purpose of any earnestness, and we need to feel that 
the writer is in earnest in order to perceive that his 
expression is not. But it is a detail of Mr. Meredith's 
general elusiveness that he does not often make us feel 
this with any force. His theory is that there is nothing 
flat-footed about the Comic Spirit, and his endeavor to 
incarnate this spirit is so thoroughgoing as to require the 
complete suppression of his personality even when it is 
needed as a guarantee of his seriousness. Nothing of 
the kind in the curiosities of literature is more ex- 
traordinary than this unexampled abuse of perhaps the 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

one iSgure of rhetoric which one would say a writer 
with a real talent for it would for that very reason be 
under no temptation to abuse. Mr. Meredith's talent 
for irony, nevertheless, is not to be denied. One of his 
very best characters, the Wise Youth Adrian in " Eich- 
ard Feverel " is wholly built up out of it, for example. 
His talent is, however, less marked than his taste for 
it, and perhaps this is the explanation of the anomaly, 
which is, after all, thus only another of the many 
anomalies inseparable from the practice of art with the 
dilettante inspiration. 

VI 

His preoccupation with "brain-stuff," moreover, 
involves one serious defect in his picture of life : it 
minimizes passion. There is infinite talk in Mr. Mere- 
dith's books about love. He has written a sonnet series 
on " Modern Love," indeed, most interesting in its intri- 
cacies. But love as a passion he treats mainly, one may 
say, in trituration. There are express experiments in 
the other direction. The idyl of Eichard Feverel and 
Lucy is as pretty, as charming, as its slightly eighteenth- 
century atmosphere, its Ferdinand and Miranda con- 
ceits, the playful but palpable aloofness of the author, 
will permit. The gondola courtship of Nevil Beau- 
champ is more than promising, but the experienced 
reader of Meredith is not surprised to encounter later 
even less than non-fulfilment. The love of Eosamund 
Culling for her husband's nephew is caressingly 

264 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

sketched because it is recondite, but it is distinctly a 
minor and incidental element of the story. In gen- 
eral, anything properly to be called passion is pre- 
sented with diluting playfulness. Even in seriousness, 
its weakness, not its force, is the side most emphasized. 
Mr. Meredith seems to care rather more for Nevil 
Beauchamp than for most of his characters, but he is 
so interested in preserving him from heroism, in his 
theoretic fashion, that he makes his passion not only 
the least persistent but the least intense phase of his 
energy, which is otherwise depicted as extravagant. 
Through the representativeness of Nevil's character, 
which is much insisted on, one is made to reflect on the 
transience and lack of depth in the passion of the 
average young man, however ebullient he may be. Can 
anything be tamer than the love-making of " Diana " 
or more debonair than that in " Harry Eichmond " or 
more insubstantial than that in " The Egoist " ? 

But " The Tragic Comedians " furnishes the most 
striking instance of Mr. Meredith's disposition to psy- 
chologize love out of all passionate intensity. If " The 
Tragic Comedians" had been sustained to the end it 
would assuredly have been the fine thing it just misses 
being. But, like so many of Mr. Meredith's books, it 
is not sustained. Half-way through the story, indeed, 
the tragic comedians may be said to be metamorphosed 
into comic tragedians, through the fading out of the 
elevating intensity of their mutual passion. As else- 
where, the thesis, not the characters, is the main point, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

and the thesis is that the obstacles to the smooth run- 
ning of the course of true love are often not external 
but psychological. There is of course a very consider- 
able external obstacle in the opposition of the heroine's 
parents. But it is made plain enough that this obstacle 
would not have proved effective had it not been for the 
alternate weakness of the lovers themselves, who are, 
as the title shows, really actors at bottom from the 
start. The effective obstacles to love which is also 
passion being, as a matter of fact, in proportion to its 
intensity, external and not psychological, the author is 
obliged by his thesis to diminish the intensity of what 
at the outset is portrayed as a passion of extraordinary 
violence; and to make this plausible the essentially 
theatrical character of the lovers has to be subsumed, 
as the metaphysicians say. The result is, as usual, that 
the picture, if true, is exceptional. It is another con- 
tribution to the cairn of the recondite. But what I 
wish to illustrate here is that the author's tunnelling 
and labyrinthine propensity for psychological analysis 
readily reconciles itself to the sacrifice of anything like 
sustained and ardent passion, even in a love story that 
ostensibly chronicles the most spontaneous and abso- 
lutely unreasonable abandonment to it. Other psycho- 
logical novelists do not thus dispense with so important 
an element of both interest and verisimilitude. Mr. 
Meredith's insensitiveness to it witnesses the dilettante 
spirit indifferent to intensity of all kinds except that 
which is very special and express and therefore, I sup- 

266 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

pose, really "worth while" — like the Squire's superb 
outburst in " Harry Eichmond," for example, or the 
description of Nevil Beauchamp's delirium, which is a 
wonderful tour de force. Undoubtedly, too, intensity of 
any simple and fundamental order is prohibited by his 
theory of the comic which exerts such an empire over 
his practice. Love in Mr. Meredith's books wears the 
aspect perhaps best pleasing to the Comic Muse of 
which he is so enamoured, but it is hardly the passion 
" that makes the world go round." 



VII 

Neveetheless — and, at least superficially, the cir- 
cumstance may be accounted singular — a considerable 
part of Mr. Meredith's vogue is probably due to his 
treatment of women, which is very special, and for 
that reason no doubt has especially won the suffrages 
of " the sex," as he is fond of calling it. The appro- 
bativeness of " the sex " at its present stage of evolu- 
tion is perhaps manifested quite as much with refer- 
ence to evaluation and appreciation as a sex as it is 
individually. It can hardly have escaped observers of 
such phenomena that it is as a sex that, currently, 
women particularly appreciate being treated as individ- 
uals. The more marked such treatment is, the more 
justice they feel is done to the sex. Mr. Meredith's 
treatment of them is in this respect very marked — so 
much so, in fact, that he obliterates very often the broad 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

distinction usually made between the young girl and the 
married woman. Diana, for example, leaves — in some 
respects — a maidenly, and some of his maidens produce 
a matronly, impression. With his women readers he has 
accordingly been, perhaps, particularly successful. He 
makes it unmistakably clear that women are psycho- 
logically worth while, complex, intricate and multifarious 
in mind as well as complicated in nature. He makes a 
point of this and underscores it, in a way that produces 
a certain effect of novelty by the stress he lays on it. 
The justice so fully rendered is given the fillip of seem- 
ing tardy justice, and therefore an element of Mr. Mere- 
dith's originality among writers of fiction. This is a 
good deal, but I think it is witness of a still greater origi- 
nality in him that he goes still further. He lays even 
greater stress upon the fact that the being thus in- 
tricately interesting and worthy of scrutiny from the 
constitution of her individual personality is also that 
most interesting of all personalities, a feminine one. 
He adds the requisite touch of chivalry. He is, after 
all, a true aficionado of " the sex." He can be trusted 
to understand, not to be too literal, not to forget that 
the singularization implied in apotheosis is a very dif- 
ferent thing from that involved in limitation. Women 
are to be discriminated as individuals, like men, but the 
fact that they possess in common and as women a cer- 
tain distinctive quality is, above all, not to be lost sight 
of. This is the permanent, the ewig, fact about them. 
Only it is to be taken as a crown, not as a mere label. 

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GEORGE MEREDITH 

Having thus won their confidence, he may say what 
he chooses without risk of misinterpretation at their 
hands. For example : " I expect that Woman will be 
the last thing civilized by Man," or that the Fools' 
Paradise is chiefly inhabited by women or " by women 
and a certain limp order of men." One could cite 
such instances by the score. He runs no risk of being 
thought to have "a contempt for women," of being 
thought superficial, that is to say. His talk about 
women is really as clever as that. A celebrated novel- 
ist of the present day is said to have remarked that he 
had reached a point finally when he could say any- 
thing he liked. Mr. Meredith has always been able to 
do that in the, for fiction, immense field concerned 
with women. It is — may one say ? — almost touching 
to note the success with which by the simple means 
of compensatory magnification he contrives to be most 
uncompromising in his treatment of their defects. 
They have waited so long, some of them doubtless 
think, to be taken seriously in just this way and to just 
this extent ! 

One of his notable contentions, which he thus sets 
forth in security, is that women are morally quite as 
complex as men, and in virtue of an equally developed 
organization rather than of a contradictory and capri- 
cious nature. This is one of his main themes. The 
sexes have their differences, as he frequently points 
out, but he finds an exact equivalence here. And the 
idea is, in the prominence that it receives from him, 

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VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

probably a genuine contribution to fiction. Other 
writers, notably Shakespeare (but one can hardly be 
theoretic without differing from Shakespeare), depict 
the moral side of women as both simpler and more 
closely allied with the entire nature. The women of 
fiction are apt to be generally classifiable as in the main 
— and much more than the men — either good or bad. 
All sorts of deductions have proceeded from this gen- 
eral assumption — such as, for example, that women 
being less exposed to temptation on account of greater 
seclusion have developed less principle; that when a 
woman is bad at all she is more apt to be thoroughly 
bad; that goodness in woman is more fundamental, 
being so completely the working hypothesis of her 
existence, practically considered ; that her greater emo- 
tional development involves more ideality in good 
conduct and consequently less of it — that is to say, 
more cynicism — in bad. 

With Mr. Meredith all this is changed by endowing 
women with an organization morally equivalent — and 
perhaps one may even say ethically identical — with 
that of men. He considers their responsibility the 
same, and, as a consequence, neither enjoys, in virtue of 
any singularity of native constitution, an immunity de- 
nied to the other. He permits himself to exercise the 
same freedom in his treatment of his women that he 
indulges in dealing with his men, and makes them do 
anything he chooses to have them in order to illustrate 
any point he wishes to make, exactly as if their moral 

270 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

actions were as unpredictable, as facultative with him, 
as those of even his adventurers and feather-headed 
enthusiasts of the opposite sex. They are played upon 
by an equally wide range of conflicting emotions, de- 
sires, temptations, and their errors are quite as much 
due to their baser selves. When they succumb, they 
fall no lower, having suffered no perversion of their 
higher nature ; and on the other hand, no complemen- 
tary exaltation results from what is often exhibited by 
other artists as an uncontrollable deflection of this same 
higher nature. Diana Warwick is an instance of the 
former; and, among others. Lord Ormont's Aminta is 
a striking one of the latter, her infidelity needing to be 
explained and minimized by an amount of philistine 
machinery which makes her out rather an unfeeling 
creature at bottom and makes one long for a touch of 
human nature — like George Sand's. Is there a trace, 
one wonders, of what he calls the " burgess " even in 
this free and elastic devotee of ideality ? He can de- 
pict Diana's baseness, but sin of the kind involved in 
following the affections into an extra-legal situation, he 
twice saves her from. He is a shade less careful with 
the marquise of " Beauchamp's Career." But even the 
Frenchwoman he saves — from everything but bitter 
humiliation. One perceives the limits his chivalry sets. 
Nevertheless, it permits him to recoup himself now 
and then in sacrificing the innocence which is usually 
insistently associated with the virtue of women. No 
writer has a more abiding sense of the charm of women, 

271 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

that charm which is so peculiar to them that when it is 
possessed by men it is only characterizable as feminine 
charm. He is haunted by it, as evinced in their phy- 
sique, their manner, their movements. Diana " swims 
to the tea-table " — all his heroines " swim " in walking. 
He lingers over minute, caressing descriptions of their 
beauty — at somewhat confusing length over Clara Mid- 
dleton's features, for example, though he is quite aware, 
as he says elsewhere, that a minute description of a face 
precludes a definite impression. But charm in his 
women is never incompatible with a kind of knowingness 
that makes innocence, strictly so-called, as Httle a char- 
acteristic of them as it is of the opposite sex. They 
have a great deal of self-reliance, of independence, of 
clairvoyance, such as even in men, one would say, is 
usually the fruit of experience. Such an exception as 
Dahlia, Ehoda Fleming's sister, who is incredibly cred- 
ulous, is so marked an exception as of herself to prove 
the rule. Even the pusillanimous Letitia in " The 
Egoist" knows very well what she is doing, and one 
hardly resents her sacrifice to her extraordinary 
minotaur. 

Innocence considered as a mental state is undoubt- 
edly open to the objection of insipidity — Like the 
amiability of an unfortified character. Innocence, 
however, as an attribute of the soul exerts a perennial 
charm. Perhaps nothing else quite takes its place, 
attractive as the "brain-stuff" which Mr. Meredith 
exalts incontestably is. And this, no doubt, is why, 

272 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

since ex hypothesi it is irrecoverable, its loss is usually 
deplored. I think even about Mr. Meredith's maidens 
there is apt to be quite as much sparkle as bloom — at 
least, about his successes, Clara Middleton and Cecilia 
Halkett, for example. But certainly in his protagonist, 
Diana Warwick, he asks us to solace ourselves with 
brilUancy and temperament for the absence of the 
finer flavor of innocence. " Diana " is the book in 
which his ideal of the equivalence — as distinguished from 
the mere interdependence — of the sexes is most explic- 
itly exposed, though everywhere in his novels one finds 
evidence of it, and, as an important deduction in detail 
from this general proposition, the according to women 
of a sentimental freedom corresponding to the grosser 
Hberty condoned in men. The unworthiness of the 
old pursuer-and-pursued sex-division yields to the jus- 
tice of permitting woman the same spontaneous in- 
terest in the other sex that is allowed to man, instead 
of confining such interest to reciprocation ; and the 
further step is, perhaps necessarily, therefore, taken of 
placing her sentimental irregularities upon the same 
plane with his excesses. Serious flirtation, in a word, 
of the Celim^ne-Millamant order (those ladies are 
great favorites with Mr. Meredith) is relatively as 
venial in her case as are excesses in his — and is privi- 
leged to the same promiscuity. The question of moral 
reprehensibility, of course, is quite aside, though the 
implication would be that, admitting degrees in moral 
reprehensibility, they would in this parallel be the 

273 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

same. Any insistence that women should be senti- 
mentally restricted, on the part of men who permit 
themselves experiences of the kind Jeremy Collier 
quaintly calls latitudinarian, is made by Mr. Meredith 
to appear inseparable from what he plainly regards as the 
feminine ideal of the Grand Turk. " Men may have 
rounded Seraglio Point. They have not yet doubled 
Cape Turk," is one of Diana's sententious deliverances. 
" Let woman have the widest sensational liberty she 
likes within the confines of virtue," he argues. "If 
you wince at the phenomena involved — her dangling 
poets like Arthur Moore, her superannuated lovers and 
their priggish nephews, her entire necessarily second- 
rate retinue and her easy acquiescence in its second- 
rateness — either you are interested and therefore 
incapable of fairness or you are an outsider as pedantic 
and arrUri as Alceste. What is this bloom of inno- 
cence you prize so highly and possess so little of? 
Merely the desideratum of a crude, not to say savage, 
instinct of the masterful male, uncivilized and un- 
developed. Evolution will inevitably dispose of it in 
due season, and meantime it would be the part of wis- 
dom in you to wince less and be worthier." 

At all events, innocence in the sense of simplic- 
ity is rather pointedly excluded from Mr. Meredith's 
feminine ideal. And it follows naturally, perhaps, 
that, having set up "the sex" in a more elaborate 
spiritual organization than is usually conceded to it 
by those who affirm it to be nearer to nature than the 

274 



GEORGE MEEEDITH 

other, he should exalt its claims to standards of its 
own. This is the other main proposition that he is 
fond of enforcing — or rather, considering his inveterate 
elusiveness, of allowing it to be divined that he advo- 
cates. Women have been long enough what men like 
them to be, what men make them. It is time that 
they imposed their own ideal and became a little more 
exacting. Let them study their own independence as 
the one priceless possession, exalt their dignity as 
women and extort from masculine fairness conformity 
to their order of aspiration. Let man, on the other 
hand, learn that woman is never so admirable as when 
she substitutes for the motive of pleasing him the 
nobler one of realizing her own destiny and following 
her own star, developing to its highest potency her 
own individuality. 

Some such view as this I gather, at all events, is the 
basis of Mr. Meredith's infinite talk about " the sex," 
and of his various incarnations of what to him is the 
ewig weihliche. It is doubtless an inspiring view, 
though, as I have intimated, its novelty, perhaps, con- 
sists largely in its emphasis. There are times and 
places, eras and environments, in which the patronage 
of women by men has appeared rudimentary and 
ridiculous, just as there are others— and perhaps in 
his own he has found this especially true — in which 
a certain degree of dependence and insipidity in women 
forms a part of the masculine ideal of them. And the 
fact that Mr. Meredith's women are to many readers 

275 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

less effective than many of their sisters in fiction limned 
by greater artists is not destructive of his general philo- 
sophic view. But heretofore, in a general way, when 
an identical standard of innocence has been advocated 
for the two sexes, it has been the standard of women. 
Nevertheless, so old is the subject of the relations of 
the sexes that there are reasons for doubting if his 
view is at all certain to get itself established — if it is 
not rather destined at most to prove a view of what is 
called a " period of transition." Women themselves, 
even women richly endowed with " brain-stuff," being 
the practical and conservative creatures Mr. Meredith 
frequently calls them, cannot be relied upon with any 
certainty to take his view of their privileges. It may 
seem logical and only fair, from a speculative point of 
view, but innocence of heart is such an important asset 
with them that the exchange of it for the satisfaction 
to be gained by getting sensations out of the emotions 
of others — as flirtation, for example, might be defined 
— is hkely to seem a risk. 

For the real obstacle to setting up a parallel be- 
tween women's sentimental and men's grosser extrava- 
gances is that innocence of heart is lost in the one case 
and not in the other. In the latter, efficacious deter- 
gents for the resulting stain — which is, of course, 
ideally speaking, detestable — are not inaccessible, the 
heart not being in any way in question. In the former 
this organ incurs the peril of either petrifaction or per- 
version. It involves the relation of familiarity with- 

276 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

out intimacy — the exact converse of the true sexual 
relation. The stakes may not be high and the player is 
generally sure of winning, but her fastidiousness is the 
entrance fee, her opponents are apt to be her inferiors, 
and the counters, which receive a good deal of handling 
in the course of the game, are her own charms. Diana's 
were burnished or tarnished in the process, as one 
chooses to look at it. But it is a little significant that 
a man of exceptionally large heart combined with ex- 
ceptional phlegm had to be provided for the apprecia- 
tion of what was left of her. One can hardly avoid 
noting the fact as part of the artificiality of her history. 
In real life, it is to be feared, the situation would have 
called for a character far more nearly resembling the 
undiscouraged chevalier of Manon Lescaut — a truly 
lamentable pair, these two, but quick with a humanity 
denied to the theoretic creations of a novelist specula- 
tively occupied with the relations of the sexes. It is 
perhaps possible that the Manon of the future will be a 
Diana, in virtue of her superior " brain-stuff." There 
would be an element of variety, no doubt, in women's 
losing their approbativeness as regards either the ad- 
miration or the respect of the opposite sex, and this 
sex is one to which variety in the other has always 
strongly appealed. One thing, however, is, I suppose, 
to be accepted as so certain that possibly Mr. Mere- 
dith's suggested reform will prove fatal to the very 
equilibrium it seeks to establish : Whether or no 
women are to cease to be what men wish, it is certain 

277 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

that men, on their side, will continue to be what women 
make them. The " view " taken in the following para- 
graph, which has nothing theoretic about it, to be sure, 
will as certainly be that of the future as it has been 
of the past : 

" And I say I think the world is like Captain 
Esmond's company I spoke of anon ; and could you see 
every man's career in life you would find a woman clog- 
ging him; or clinging round his march and stopping 
him ; or cheering him and goading him ; or beckoning 
him out of her chariot so that he goes up to her, and 
leaves the race to be run without him ; or bringing him 
the apple and saying ' Eat ' ; or fetching him the dag- 
gers and whispering ' Kill ! yonder lies Duncan, and a 
crown and an opportunity.' " 

VIII 

In any case, however, Mr. Meredith's treatment of 
women is distinctly an imaginative treatment and re- 
minds us that one of his chief titles to his high rank 
as a novelist is an extraordinary imagination. It is 
an imagination remarkable not only for exuberance but 
for scope. Like every other phase of his talent it is 
unchecked, but it is unmistakably both opulent and 
acute. Its exercise gives one the feeling that he is 
never at a loss for incident or motive, and makes that 
effect of inexhaustible fulness, of self -renewing poten- 
tiality, of there being plenty more left in his sack, which 

278 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

is a definite mark of genius. He never " saves for the 
next book," as Mr. Henry James says. One feels the 
assurance that he never needs to save. Novelty, and 
significant novelty, is his element. He is never at a 
loss for a theme — a real theme, capable of organic and 
intricate elaboration and having itself interest and 
vitality. Details spring spontaneously into flower in 
fertile profusion along the path of its development. 
He must be the envy of the more strictly professional 
novelists. One understands the reported remark of 
Mr. Stevenson : " He is the master of all of us." In 
imagination "Harry Eichmond" certainly stands at 
the head of the modern fiction that essays the difficult 
task of enduing with vivid realistic intensity material 
of the most exceptionally romantic character. It was 
probably the first of the genre. " Kidnapped," " Treas- 
ure Island," " Prince Otto," " St. Ives " derive from it 
very strictly. It is the result of the imagination com- 
bined with thought, with reflection — the imagination 
which has a strong tincture of intellect, whose luxuri- 
ance though unrestrained is directed by a sophisticated, 
or at least the literary, inspiration. It reminds us that 
Mr. Meredith's imagination is kept too well in hand 
for pure spontaneity. It is the servant of his artifice. 
His invention, which is of an astonishing activity, out- 
runs it. Half-way through "Harry Eichmond," for 
example, it flags, and a little further fails altogether, 
though the author's mechanical inventiveness increases 
proportionally in intricacy and endeavor for plausi- 

279 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

bility. The spontaneity with which the story started 
and which stimulated its remarkable rapidity of move- 
ment and variety of detail has exhaled, and for a 
couple of hundred pages we drag along with gradually 
diminishing momentum. 

I have said that his world is not a real one and it 
is not. It is an extremely artificial one. But his 
imagination endues it with indubitable animation. It 
is animate like that of the Kestoration drama, for 
which he has a weakness, and which, in spite of the 
robustness of many of the typical characters, is often 
similarly unreal. One could form but a faint concep- 
tion, for example, of how his " puppetry " (his word for 
Thackeray's people) would look, or what they would 
say or do, should they aU meet at some large party in 
" fable-land." Yet it is eminently " fable-land " that is 
their home. Nothing is more curious than the va-et- 
vient of Mr. Meredith's figures, pulled by general 
rather than individual psychological strings, amid the 
highly poetized fields and woods and highways and 
sea-shores that his fancy furnishes for their play- 
ground. 

His poetic faculty is very clear and very distin- 
guished. As exhibited in his formal verse it is per- 
haps too surcharged with significance to have the 
plastic interest essential to verse. It is in form so 
convoluted as often to be obscure to the point of being 
unreadable. But he is a great landscape-painter. He 
has the poet's concrete vision. He never indulges in 

280 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

the rhapsody of the rhetorician. Some of his descrip- 
tions of nature are extremely beautiful, even memor- 
able, in their combined radiance and precision. Oc- 
casionally, one reflects, they are a httle too important. 
Not only are they digressions, like his famous " wine " 
and " ale " excursions, but now and then, though back- 
ground, they exchange values with the figures. But 
Mr. Meredith's background, landscape aside, is in gen- 
eral as unreal as his figures, and contributes to the net 
artificial impression made by his books. It is rarely 
locaHzed, in the sense of reference to actual places. 
Any of his action might take place anywhere. Mainly 
it takes place in England, as a matter of fact, but 
there is no specific picture of the real England of 
town or country. It might equally well have occurred 
in Barataria. The contrast with the background of 
Dickens and Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot is 
in this respect very great. It is true that when his 
background is landscape Mr. Meredith's poetic faculty 
gives it a reality of its own, an imaginative reality. 
But in his novels his poetic faculty is almost altogether 
consecrated to the service of nature — nature and now 
and then the youthful feminine countenance, as where 
in "Beauchamp's Career" he deHciously describes 
Eenee's features as having "the soft irregularities 
which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks 
the light." In dealing with character he explicitly 
abandons it to grasp at purely intellectual interest, at 
what he calls and worships as "Philosophy." "Phi- 

281 



VICTOKIAN PROSE MASTERS 

losophy" and consequent preoccupation with "brain- 
stuff" is, he says in the introduction to "Diana" — a 
little naively perhaps for so true a dilettante — the one 
ingredient needful in the composition of fiction hereto- 
fore neglected even by such a Titan as Thackeray, but 
hereafter to be supplied by himself in spite of the aver- 
sion to it of the philistine British public. Unfortu- 
nately for his theory, his own practice, at any rate, 
results in the more or less gradual transformation of 
imagination into mere invention, so that the animation 
of his characters, which at the outset is often active 
enough, owing to the vivacity of his conception of 
them (owing, that is to say, to his imagination), de- 
clines into distinctly mechanical movement (which is 
all that invention can command). In a word, his 
imagination, even, has its factitious side. 

IX 

His most unimpeachable claim, one is finally forced 
to conclude, is his general intellectual eminence. About 
that there can be no manner of doubt. It is lofty, defi- 
nite and impressive. No novelist has so many ideas. 
He is the embodiment of culture, but he is absolutely 
independent, and does, his own thinking with noticeable 
care and self-reliance. His learning, his reading, is 
obviously very great, but it is thoroughly assimilated. 
He has no pedantries ; his recondite allusions, though 
frequent, are always sincere and apt. His training has 

282 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

been of the broadest; his Continental education is 
easily seen in his point of view, his freedom from pro- 
vinciality of any kind, the untrammelled and untradi- 
tional character of his criticism, his very notable 
elasticity. Full as he is of whims, he has no prejudices. 
His candor is a conspicuous trait, and the reader comes 
insensibly to rely upon it — a circumstance that in- 
creases the exasperation produced by the odd conjunc- 
tion with his candor of his perversity. And — an 
unusual combination, perhaps — he unites with this 
distinction of culture a wholly extraordinary power 
of insight. His penetration is wonderfully acute. 
And human character is its true field. One can hardly 
overpraise him here. At every turn you are reminded 
of his having noted some peculiarity of thought, some 
trait eHcited by certain circumstances, phenomena of 
mind and motive that you at once recognize as true 
and often as recondite as well. A large proportion of 
his readers, at least his admiring readers, probably en- 
joy the experience of saying to themselves every few 
pages : " Ah ! He knows that, too, it seems. I have 
never encountered that in any other writer. This I 
have myself remarked, but had supposed it my own 
discovery. How odd that I should never have thought 
of that, but how true it is ! " And active-minded read- 
ers have few experiences more enjoyable. 

He does not, often, perhaps, make yoic think. He 
does not in general stimulate reflection. He is always 
actively thinking himself, but after you have thought 

283 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

out his meaning on occasions when it is obscure you 
are apt to relapse into rumination at best. In this re- 
spect he is the antithesis of George EHot, for example, 
whose pregnant observations have the property of 
starting trains of thought. Moreover, his gift of ex- 
pression leads him to leave nothing to the reader. 
In cases where he does not dissemble his meaning 
through perversity, his power of explicit, and tendency 
to exuberant, expression exhaust the subject. Take 
him at his best : " That excruciating twist within of 
the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their 
course to grind the contrary to those of the heart." 
Excellent as this is — " grind " is particularly penetrat- 
ing and graphic — it has hardly the suggestiveness of 
such a chance phrase as George Eliot's " early morning 
tears," or Thackeray's mere association of " women 
and priests." And in general, I think, if his observa- 
tions on human life, character, relations, have a defect 
corresponding to their admirable quality, it is that, spite 
of their penetration, they lack what the French call 
jporUe. They have a distinct tendency to note peculi- 
arities. They are the result of scrutiny, many-faceted 
and never partial, but not of the comprehensive gaze 
that sees psychologic detail as part of a vaster whole 
which it keeps ever in mind. If they were, one would 
find, as one rarely if ever does, the same observation 
recurring from time to time, as different situations 
bring out the same central truth. The kind of thing 
one generally finds — and delights in — in Mr. Mere- 

284 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

dith is : " Men's faith in a woman whom her sisters dis- 
countenance and partially repudiate is uneasy, however 
deeply they may be charmed. On the other hand, she 
may be guilty of prodigious oddities without much dis- 
turbing their reverence, while she is in the feminine 
circle." Or: "The attempt to read an inscrutable 
woman allows her to dominate us too commandingly." 
Or : " Euffling and making that pretence at the con- 
trolling of her bosom which precedes a feminine storm." 
Nevertheless, Mr. Meredith's books spread out be- 
fore one a multifarious network of circumstance and 
situation whose reaction on that most interesting of all 
impression-registering media, human nature, is subtly, 
sapiently, always elaborately considered. There are 
a half-dozen pages in the fifth chapter of " The Tragic 
Comedians," for instance, dealing with the effect upon 
lovers of their mistresses' previous experiences of the 
heart, that constitute a kind of essay on the subject 
such as would make the fortune of many a " psychologi- 
cal novelist." There are passages everywhere in all his 
books that show the acutest discrimination and the 
subtlest philosophical generalizing. Gathered into an 
anthology of his " wit and wisdom," as they have been, 
they are, to be sure, easily less striking ; " The Pilgrim's 
Scrip " is not a serious rival of La Eochefoucauld. Their 
significance has more relief when one meets them swim- 
ming in the stream of the author's prolixity, where 
they seem like " glorious islets " and gain meaning by 
contrast; but here their unexpected solidity is very 

285 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

effective. In a word, whatever one's impressions of 
Mr. Meredith's novels as novels, they indubitably con- 
tain a great deal of apt, entertaining and original com- 
ment upon the general subject of human nature. 

The fact, however, has two modifications which, as 
constantly as itself, are forced upon the reader's atten- 
tion. In the first place, his art gains nothing or next 
to nothing from the "Philosophy" to which he is so 
devoted. This not only quite eclipses his art in inter- 
est, but, being so essentially of a generalizing cast, con- 
sisting so exclusively of general reflections suggested 
by the specific business in hand, is at most a decoration 
rather than an auxiliary of it. His philosophizing is 
concrete enough in itself, but it is so used as to render 
his art abstract. It saps the substance and obscures 
the outline of his characters by withdrawing attention 
from them and concentrating it on " the human heart " 
in general, its various phases and intricate organization 
as illustrated by the personages whom it should rather 
itself illuminate and explain. What is Sir Willoughby 
Patterne but incarnate comment on the text of egoism ? 
In a word, his philosophy, interesting as it is, weak- 
ens his characterization — certainly the novelist's main 
business. 

In the second place, it is confined to psychological 
phenomena — undoubtedly a source of strength within 
its limits but in itself a notable limitation of his range 
of intellectual interests. There are some poHtics and 
social economy in " Beauchamp's Career," but in the 

286 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

other novels the whole intellectual field outside of the 
study of " the human mechanism " is neglected. There 
is an occasional reference to national characteristics, a 
rebuke to British misconception of France and French- 
men here and there, and for the rest a quite wonderful 
feeling for nature and a remarkably poetic faculty of 
concrete portrayal of it. No " questions " of any kind 
interest Mr. Meredith. Italian unification is an inspira- 
tion in " Vittoria " and there is a sympathetic reference 
to woman suffrage in " Diana." But such things do 
not count beside the conspicuous fact that his world, 
sharp as is the philosophic shadow that it casts, has 
no philosophic penumbra. Keligion does not enter his 
realm at all. Art does not exist there. Philosophy, as 
distinct from philosophizing, has no attractions for him. 
He has no system, even the vaguest, and no general 
synthesis. His " criticism of life," though penetrat- 
ing and perhaps consistent, is limited and above all 
desultory. No one would think of calling him a phi- 
losopher in any strict sense, or, outside the realm of 
psychology, in any sense at all. He has eminently no 
standing as a sentimentalist, in the sense in which 
Eichardson, Eousseau and Thackeray are sentimental- 
ists. As a moralist he has no direct and striking 
force. His novels are hardly prevented by his pro- 
fessed devotion to " Philosophy " from being a contribu- 
tion to literature of the " art for art's sake " order. The 
Comic Muse exacts his exclusive allegiance in treatment 
of the gravest substance. " All fables," says Thoreau, 

287 



VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS 

" have their morals, but the innocent enjoy the story." 
Mr. Meredith's fables have no morals, which is perhaps 
the reason why they are most attractive to the sophisti- 
cated. No such picture of human life, so highly organ- 
ized and so elaborately commented, was ever so little of 
a text for deductions of real moment as to the world 
of which it is ostensibly a miniature and a criticism. 
And this being the case, it is to be regretted that, since 
it is only beauty that is its own excuse for being, the 
picture is not more artistically effective or more tem- 
peramentally compelhng. 

His imagination, his intellectual eminence and his 
analytic treatment of human nature, however, give his 
novels a rank in the hterature of fiction which neither 
his constructive art nor his temperament would, unaided, 
win for them. The fact itself is remarkable. That so 
really imposing an edifice as his varied and numerous 
books compose should be unsupported by either of these 
two elements of enduring strength — one of which may 
be lacking, but rarely both in any structure of monu- 
mental dignity, literary or other — of itself constitutes 
one of the most interesting of literary anomalies. But 
what one misses most in his work is the large rhythm 
that undulates through that of the great writers, the 
sustained note of informing purpose, the deep vibration 
of some unifying undertone, now rising to accent and 
emphasis, now sounding faintly beneath the multi- 
fariousness of accompanying motives, but always audi- 
ble to an attentive sense as the basis if not the burden 

288 



GEORGE MEREDITH 

of the " theme with variations " that the ensemble of 
every great writer's compositions constitutes. Mr. 
Meredith has no theme ; he has a dozen, a score — as 
many as he has books. And this, I imagine, is the 
standing menace to the increase of his popularity and 
the permanence of his fame. 



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